A new paper, “Metrics that matter for assessing the ocean biological carbon pump” published online April 6th, has landed on the COVER of the May 5th print edition of PNAS . Written by Ken Buessler, former PhD student Erin Black and collaborators Phil Boyd and David Siegle, they demonstrate that the depth of the sunlit area of the ocean where photosynthesis occurs varies significantly geographically. By taking into account these depths throughout the ocean they found that possibly twice the amount of carbon sinks into the ocean per year than has been previously estimated.

Read more and watch a video about the Ocean Carbon Pump and these results in this WHOI press release: The ocean’s ‘biological pump’ captures more carbon than expected