Mud glorious mud.
So people often look at me strangely when I talk about work. For a start I mostly work with mud, and I get it, mud isn't necessarily the most exciting looking substance. It's not coral, its not a whale and its not a deep-sea hydrothermal vent, but its important and it covers the majority of the sea floor. What's really exciting about mud is that there's a lot of it, and a lot of it is actually dead plants and animals. So much so that the the deep-sea floor is said to be an ooze of dead plankton.
So the important bit, each if the little dead plants and animals (that lie in the mud) contain carbon and as they rot away they release carbon dioxide back into the oceans (or atmosphere), but this is slow and a lot of the carbon never gets released - some even forms oil (eventually). But what happens as the climate changes? The earth is getting warmer and this makes the animals and bacteria living in the mud get hungrier (or more active), the net result is (potentially) release of more carbon dioxide which (potentially) means even more warming.
So if we want to understand how climate change will affect our planet. We really need to think about mud.
That old story about the forests being the planets lungs are only half right. The Plants are just a breath in. What happens at the seafloor (and soils) allows the planet to hold its breath!
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