[HN Gopher] Sugar deposits found under seagrass meadows
___________________________________________________________________
Sugar deposits found under seagrass meadows
Author : nradov
Score : 187 points
Date : 2022-05-23 12:47 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theweathernetwork.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theweathernetwork.com)
| Tepix wrote:
| > _The study reported that the giant piles of excess sugar were
| not being consumed by the bacteria due to phenolic compounds
| released by the seagrass, which cannot be digested by many
| microorganisms. This was a key finding for the researchers, as it
| confirms that the carbon in the sugar stays in these underwater
| ecosystems and out of the atmosphere._
|
| Interesting, sugar is so energy dense, isn't it just a matter of
| time until some organism figures out how to take advantage of it
| despite the phenols?
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| I'd guess that's correct. It reminds me of the Carboniferous
| era when there weren't any organisms around that could eat
| lignin, so dead trees just piled up until they were so thick,
| they turned into coal.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous
| fbanon wrote:
| quantified wrote:
| Downvotes indicate a lack of appreciation for your sarcasm.
| No tone of voice available when writing.
| guerrilla wrote:
| I'm not sure why you think it was sarcasm... the video is
| literally about that. 5.2K people liked that video, so
| how do we know that person isn't one of them?
| quantified wrote:
| If it was sarcasm, I've given them a useful tip. If it
| wasn't, I've gently trolled them. You couldn't hear my
| tone either.
| atombender wrote:
| Note that this hypothesis has been challenged, e.g. here [1]
| (paper here [2]).
|
| [1] https://www.earthmagazine.org/article/lack-fungi-did-not-
| lea...
|
| [2] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1517943113
| pfortuny wrote:
| Honest question: don't animals do it? Or do you mean
| "microorganisms"?
| gumby wrote:
| Many (most?) animals cannot digest straight glucose, e.g.
| cats, which are obligate carnivores. I suspect most animals
| would have to be able to digest starches to be able to
| process sugars (though a good exception is the bee, so my
| surmise could be bogus).
|
| I believe that cats don't even have sweet taste receptors.
| I've done "experiments" over the years, offering my own food
| to various of our household (terrestrial) pets. Cats and
| rodents are the most picky; dogs will eat a proper superset
| of what cats do, except that I have never had a dog that
| liked drinking milk (eating cheese, though, sure, and ice
| cream). Dogs seem OK with sugar (not crazy about it) cats are
| utterly uninterested.
| fingerlocks wrote:
| I was curious, so I just mixed a teaspoon of sugar and
| water into a paste and put it in my dogs' bowls. Two
| completely different breeds. Both went crazy for it. Both
| love Milk too. Neither dog will eat raw fruit
| yetihehe wrote:
| I had a dog which was absolutely crazy for cucumbers. He
| was typically sneaking into garden, sniffing for
| cucumbers among leaves, took it out and eat it. When I
| was peeling cucumber, he was salivating and whimpering to
| eat peelings, he would get angry if I didn't share at
| least some of of them. My current dog eats almost
| anything (he didn't like raw lemon), including most
| fabrics, but he's only a year old. Had to electrify the
| garden though because he digged and tried to eat compost.
| colechristensen wrote:
| An ancestor of all cat species lost a gene required for
| sweet taste, so none of them could taste sugar which could
| be why they became obligate carnivores.
| nisegami wrote:
| The key here is "despite the phenols". What any such organism
| would need to develop is not so much a way to use the sugar,
| but rather a way to safeguard against phenols.
| pfortuny wrote:
| Thanks.
| grammers wrote:
| Until some bacteria mutates to digest it. It's definitely not a
| long-term solution.
| bin_bash wrote:
| Well the purpose of jam is to conserve fruit with sugar so
| maybe not. Honey also doesn't spoil even after thousands of
| years.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Sugar is a conservant too. Kills organisms by osmosis.
| dylan604 wrote:
| It is a very slow process though
| tambourine_man wrote:
| Only in much, much higher concentrations, like those of
| honey.
| kemiller wrote:
| This is fascinating but how long before some enterprising person
| mines it and puts it in chic packaging and sells it to bougie
| consumers as "sea sugar" with implied health benefits?
| gibolt wrote:
| Or labels it as organic, and green? While actually damaging an
| ocean ecosystem (that may help fend off climate change)
| ghostbrainalpha wrote:
| I wouldn't put that out there on this forum. It's full of
| entrepreneurial persons who might like that idea.
| aaron695 wrote:
| say_it_as_it_is wrote:
| Oh no. People are burning down the Brazilian rain forest for even
| less to gain.
| asn1parse wrote:
| i dont often observe clickbait rise in these ranks
| calebm wrote:
| This doesn't seem particularly novel. It's already well
| understood that plants deposit sugar into the ground they grow in
| to encourage beneficial bacterial and fungal growth. It's
| basically the plants gut:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhizosphere
| mothsonasloth wrote:
| New Coke, now made with high sucrose seagrass syrup.
| notorandit wrote:
| Cool! So everyone will try to harvest that sugar (maybe to
| produce fuel?) so even more carbon can be released. Hot!
| ordu wrote:
| So in treacle mines[1] people mine for sugar from a prehistoric
| sea?
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treacle_mining
| yalogin wrote:
| I don't understand the significance of this. What if we found
| huge quantities of sugar, what does it mean to me, to the oceans,
| to the environment? Not trying to be flippant, I am not able to
| make the connection, but can someone dumb it down and spell it
| out for me?
| DeathArrow wrote:
| It seems it's not enough to exploit it as fuel.
| blakesterz wrote:
| "That is roughly comparable to the amount of sugar in 32 billion
| cans of Coke!"
|
| That's a unique unit of measure I've not seen before. I know in
| one of Gary Larson's old books he had a comment on his
| "skeletonize a cow in less than a minute" comic about how he
| loves weird units of measurement like this.
|
| https://ifunny.co/picture/MMQBLmZr5
| [deleted]
| yetihehe wrote:
| There's a meme that americans will use anything to avoid metric
| system. Typically with examples like "hole in the road with the
| size of 2 washing machines".
| titzer wrote:
| American here, lived in Europe a while, but back.
|
| I got decent with meters. Recently, I've been thinking about
| ways to visualize a billion. Here's one:
|
| There's a billion cubic millimeters in a cubic meter (cubic
| yard). If you take a meter (yardstick) and visualize the 1000
| millimeters in it, then make a plane of that 1000x1000, i.e.
| a million, then stack a thousand of those, that's a billion.
|
| I still can't get my head around it, TBH. A billion is a lot!
|
| But "billion cubes" are a nice unit; you can stack up a lot
| of them to get more billions.
| AaronM wrote:
| I wonder if folks do that because its easier to picture a
| hole the size of two washing machines. That would be like 4-6
| sq ft which can be more difficult to visualize.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| It can get more extremes than memes. Some government agencies
| have policies specifically avoiding the metric system in
| public announcements. Issue a statement about a 30 centimeter
| wave event and a good percentage of people in coastal areas
| might panic. Trial attorneys also coach witnesses to never
| speak in metric as at least one person on every jury won't be
| able to follow ... and two more will hate you for forcing
| them to remember words they last heard in highschool.
| badwolf wrote:
| I like the "Large boulder the size of a small boulder"
| measurement system by the San Miguel Sheriff. -
| https://twitter.com/SheriffAlert/status/1221881862244749315
| xeromal wrote:
| This is great lol
| tmountain wrote:
| There's a great Simpsons joke where Grandpa says, "the metric
| system is the tool of the devil, my car gets 40 rods to the
| hog's head, and that's the way I like it!"
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5-s-4KPtD8
| gen220 wrote:
| For those who are curious, 1 rod is 0.003125 miles. Thus,
| 40 rods is 0.125 miles. 1 hogshead is 1/63 of a US gallon.
|
| Thus, 40 rods to the hog's head is 7.875 miles per gallon,
| 29.87 L/100km, or 3.348 km/L.
|
| EDIT: sorry, 1 hogshead is 63 US gallons. This comes to
| about 0.002 miles per gallon... yikes! (divide all the
| numbers in the previous paragraph by 63^2)
| dwighttk wrote:
| Huh. Why is a hogshead so small? If you had asked me to
| guess I would have said like 3 1/32nd (or some weird
| small additional amount) gallons.
|
| Wait. I'm seeing that hogshead is like 63 "wine" gallons,
| not 1/63 gallon. (Not sure conversion of wine gallons to
| usual gallons though.)
| gen220 wrote:
| Ooh you're totally right, thank you for pointing it out!
|
| I think my brain was subconsciously seeking a miles-per-
| gallon result in a "reasonable" order of magnitude.
| Edited original comment.
| dwighttk wrote:
| They don't make hogs like they used to
| BizarroLand wrote:
| From a quick search it seems both a normal gallon and a
| wine gallon are measured at 231 cubic cm of liquid, so
| they're the same. There is a proof gallon which only
| counts the ethanol content of the liquid towards the
| gallon, so a 100 proof alcohol would require 2 gallons of
| liquid to equal 1 proof gallon of liquor.
| cossatot wrote:
| The greatest Simpsons car-and-measurement-unit bit is of
| course this one: "She'll go 300 hectares on a single tank
| of kerosene" which maybe makes sense if you're plowing a
| field... Part of a pretty amazing 20 second bit. Pure old
| Simpsons gold.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07vdtBMG4Kg
| drewzero1 wrote:
| If you wish that 20 seconds would last a little longer,
| and also be remixed into a song, check out "Put it in H"
| by Dankmus.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HXT7fDkf9I
| chucksta wrote:
| Those are/were real units
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hogshead
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_(unit)
| Sebb767 wrote:
| So his car takes roughly 300l to move 200m in SI units,
| or 45000l/100km.
| quantified wrote:
| That's why it's Grandpa and funny.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Are there, by chance, any fake units that exist?
| gostsamo wrote:
| Does the Register's measurement converter count?
|
| https://www.theregister.com/Design/page/reg-standards-
| conver...
| AaronM wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_humorous_units_of_m
| eas...
| ars wrote:
| Yes, the smoot
| buttocks wrote:
| I'm fond of the shit ton.
|
| The Canadian metric equivalent is the metric crap tonne.
| thedrbrian wrote:
| Us brits have "shed load"
| dwighttk wrote:
| Buttload is not fake however
| cwillu wrote:
| The shit tonne and the fuck load come to mind.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| F**stick?
| irrational wrote:
| Doesn't "avoid" imply that Americans are actually giving the
| metric system any thought?
| temp0826 wrote:
| How many libraries of congresses is that?
| [deleted]
| donthellbanme wrote:
| deaps wrote:
| I mean that's easier to visualize than saying a "hole in the
| road that is about 92 cubic centimeters."
| pueblito wrote:
| Where I'm from, we'd just say "There's a big ass hole in
| the road"
| ntoskrnl wrote:
| Around here that's just a normal morning commute
| Tagbert wrote:
| Is that an imperial ass or a metric ass?
| gus_massa wrote:
| A big bottle of soda is 1000 or 2000 cubic centimeters. A
| can of soda is 200 or 300 cubic centimeters. A glass of
| water has 200 or 300 cubic centimeters. 92 cubic
| centimeters is half a glass of water.
| Zababa wrote:
| I think that's because they're not really equivalent. At
| least for me, a hole the size of 2 washing machines is
| something that will look close to two washing machines put
| together. That limits the shape it can have. On the other
| hand, 92 cubic centimeters doesn't. It could be a 1cm x 1cm
| x 92cm hole, which wouldn't be possible with 2 washing
| machines.
|
| If we assume that the two washing machines are side to
| side, and that the average washing machine is 60cm x 60cm x
| 85 cm (height), that would be a hole 1.20m width x 60 cm
| depth x 85 cm height. The washing machine example is still
| easier to visualize, but it's also better than "a 612 000
| cubic centimeters hole".
| snovv_crash wrote:
| You'd say something like "2 cubic metres". Which is
| roughly the size of 2 washing machines.
| OJFord wrote:
| I think 'hole in the road' comes with its own
| visualisation more likely to be accurate than anything
| you get from 'two washing machines'.
| harry8 wrote:
| How do you accurately visualize whether "hole in the
| road" means you saying "what was that?" And driving on
| without slowing. Or whether the hole will require a crane
| to get your car to a place where it can be towed if you,
| possibly inadvertently, attempt to drive over it?
| OJFord wrote:
| I meant regarding shape.
| replygirl wrote:
| holes can be all sorts of shapes
| OJFord wrote:
| But rarely like washing machines. (Which can also be all
| sorts of shapes anyway.)
| brewdad wrote:
| Aside from side by side vs stackable, every washing
| machine I've ever encountered is roughly the same shape.
| Some edges are rounder and the door might be on the front
| or the top but the shape is the same.
| OJFord wrote:
| The vast majority are approximately cuboid boxes, sure.
| Ever seen a hole in the road like that?
| brk wrote:
| So like 1/20th of a cubic fathom?
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| > hole in the road that is about 92 cubic centimeters
|
| 92 cubic centimeters is a pretty small hole...
|
| a hole in the road 1.5mx80cmx60cm is pretty easy to
| understand or imagine, when you know metric system and
| absolutely trivial to convert: ~0.70 cubic meters or ~700
| liters or ~700.000 cubic centimeters
|
| Washing machines comes of all sizes.
|
| Is it like the slim one I have at home to save space or
| like the ones I find in laundromats?
|
| Metric units have standards.
|
| I don't know how many people would understand "a hole in
| the road the size of 137 trays of home made tiramisu"
|
| TBF here too when the media want to make analogies, they
| are pretty terrible: "an asteroid the size of 8 soccer
| fields" means nothing to me, ~800 meters makes much more
| sense.
| dhosek wrote:
| I'm fond of odd measures. I like to say that something is the
| size of a [?]'s head, for example, "that burger is the size of
| a cat's head." I also will describe a date as being a week and
| a half from some arbitrary date.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I used to work in a produce department, so I do the same
| thing but with fruits and veggies.
| somishere wrote:
| V. useful for your next pregnancy
| johncoltrane wrote:
| I dread my coming house move because of how many billies of
| books I have :-).
| dhosek wrote:
| My problem with moving is always that once I've unpacked
| the books and the music stuff, I tend to lose interest so I
| end up with boxes of stuff lurking for months afterwards.
| Being married helps a bit, but my wife has her own blind
| spots and we still have boxes in the basement eleven years
| later that have yet to be unpacked.
| Wohlf wrote:
| When it comes to moving books I measure in how many days it
| will take to stop being sore.
| cobbal wrote:
| I do a very similar thing. Sometimes when I describe my
| height, I'm "five and a half foot, nine"
| memling wrote:
| > That's a unique unit of measure I've not seen before.
|
| There are some fun Wikipedia entries on the subject:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unusual_units_of_measu...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_humorous_units_of_meas...
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| A billion hours ago, human life appeared on earth. A billion
| minutes ago, Christianity emerged. A billion seconds ago, the
| Beatles changed music. A billion Coca-Colas ago was yesterday
| morning.
|
| --Robert Goizueta, chief executive of the Coca-Cola Company,
| April 1997
| slim wrote:
| so that represents between 32 and 64 days of coca cola
| production of 1997.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| Putting it that way made me immediately think that that's less
| than 4 cans per person. I would have thought that more actual
| cans of coke were in circulation.
| postingawayonhn wrote:
| Well they apparently sell nearly 2 billion bottles a day.
| flint wrote:
| Did you see where OP changed the units of measure from cans
| to bottles...
| jvanderbot wrote:
| One evening as the sun went down
|
| And the basalt fire was burning
|
| Down the track came a mermaid swimming
|
| and he say "Boys I'm not turning"
|
| I'm headed for a pond that's far away
|
| beside the seagrass fountains
|
| so come with me and we'll go and see
|
| The big rock candy mountains.
| bozhark wrote:
| Thank you for changing the title
| monkeybutton wrote:
| I wonder if would taste good fermented and distilled. There's
| rarely a source of sugars that humans haven't tried to make into
| booze.
| nisegami wrote:
| You might be on to something. It already has phenols, which are
| basically alcohols. /s
| INTPenis wrote:
| No let's not take any large quantaties of anything else from
| the ocean. Leave it.
| christophilus wrote:
| Wild. Let's hope it never becomes an economically viable thing to
| harvest.
| VGltZUNvbnN1 wrote:
| I bet in 1-2 days you will find some twitter users who will
| write an essay about how we should harvest ocean sugar and
| plant more wheat instead of corn or sugar beets.
| slackfan wrote:
| Time to get minin'.
| derriz wrote:
| "between 0.6 and 1.3 million tons of sugar" doesn't sound like a
| lot? Humankind is adding 35 BILLION tonnes of carbon dioxide per
| year.
| vmception wrote:
| > just one square kilometre of seagrass stores nearly twice as
| much carbon as forests on land at a rate 35 times faster
|
| Time to kill the seagrass meadows
| tediousdemise wrote:
| Haha, seriously.
|
| Us humans will completely devastate anything we can get our
| greedy, shitty little monkey paws on.
| tediousdemise wrote:
| Cool! But let's give the rampant environmental destruction a
| break and leave the ocean sugar right where it belongs in its
| natural ecosystem.
| idbehold wrote:
| Oh, to live on Sugar Mountain
|
| With the seagrass and their excreted sucrose.
|
| - Neil Young maybe
| late2part wrote:
| Come on, Charlie! Let's go to Seagrass Meadows!
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Original paper:
|
| > "Here, we show that the seagrass, Posidonia oceanica excretes
| sugars, mainly sucrose, into its rhizosphere. These sugars
| accumulate to uM concentrations--nearly 80 times higher than
| previously observed in marine environments. This finding is
| unexpected as sugars are readily consumed by microorganisms. Our
| experiments indicated that under low oxygen conditions, phenolic
| compounds from P. oceanica inhibited microbial consumption of
| sucrose."
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-022-01740-z
|
| A sugar like glucose is ~180 grams/mol. A uM concentration of
| glucose is going to be less than a milligram of sugar per liter
| of ocean water. In contrast, a liter of Coke contains ~120 grams
| of sugar (~ 0.6 M).
|
| It's kind of interesting because the seagrass appears to be
| feeding sugar to bacteria, which might be doing nitrogen fixation
| in return, but it's hardly 'mountains of sugar'.
| aristophenes wrote:
| Yes, and the carbon storage of all the seagrass sugar in the
| world is roughly equivalent to one day of automobile driving in
| the USA. But everywhere in the article it is phrased to make it
| appear like a world changing amount of carbon. Why?
| montalbano wrote:
| I think the point of the article is that understanding how
| seagrass captures carbon is useful and interesting.
|
| For more relevant numbers, I did a very quick calculation
| (tell me if you spot a mistake).
|
| Using these numbers [0, 1], the worlds seagrass captures ~5%
| of US automobile emissions per year.
|
| Another number of interest, the amount of seagrass carbon
| sequestration is 2 - 4x greater than mature tropical
| rainforests (per hectare) [0].
|
| Seems to me that seagrass is an organism worth understanding.
|
| [0] https://www.thebluecarboninitiative.org/about-blue-carbon
|
| [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1120499/us-road-
| vehicle-...
| wolfram74 wrote:
| It's my understanding that early steam engines were pretty
| rubbish until the underlying thermodynamics were understood
| and then you could engineer your way to a Watt Engine [0]
| that was revolutionary. The nearly two order of magnitude
| superiority of this sea grass on this metric is
| tantalizing.
|
| [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watt_steam_engine
| i386 wrote:
| > I think the point of the article is that understanding
| how seagrass captures carbon is useful and interesting.
|
| You've perfectly described why pure research science has
| merit in its own right.
|
| Application of knowledge comes a little later.
| dwighttk wrote:
| The ocean is big though. I think the headline writer was
| imagining the piles of sugar if you pulled it all out of the
| water and stacked it up.
| BoiledCabbage wrote:
| I mean with that logic, there are mountains of lint in
| people's pockets. And mountains of cobwebs in their
| basements.
|
| Just about everything forms a mountain if you combine all
| instances of it in the world into a big pile.
|
| If anything, it'd only be notable if something didn't form a
| mountain when piled.
| dwighttk wrote:
| Imagine if lint was a well known food for bacteria and all
| the sudden it might be notable if bacteria were leaving it
| alone in pockets
| patall wrote:
| Are you Dutch? 1g of lint per human is ~8,000 tons, which
| at 4g/cm3 is a cube of ~14m. Mountains are huge ;)
| umvi wrote:
| It's notable because it's free energy that isn't being
| consumed for some reason. Sprinkle some sugar on the ground
| outside and ants will swoop in and grab it in minutes.
| hoseja wrote:
| Seagrass only grows in the shallows.
| dwighttk wrote:
| Not as big, but still pretty big.
| divbzero wrote:
| For alternative points of reference, ~120 g of sugar is ~140 mL
| or ~0.60 US cups.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| That is really interesting. Can we cultivate sea grass to make
| carbon capture ponds or forests?
| nradov wrote:
| Sea grass already grows pretty much everywhere it can grow, so
| I don't think we can cultivate a lot more (at least not without
| disrupting other sensitive marine ecosystems). It's more
| important to prevent pollution that would kill existing sea
| grass.
| montalbano wrote:
| Have you got a reference for that?
|
| This article suggests that "92% of the UK's seagrass has been
| lost in the past two centuries, with 39% disappearing just
| since the 1980s, thanks to pollution from industry, mining
| and farming, along with dredging, bottom trawling and coastal
| development."
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/nov/05/seagrass.
| ..
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| What are the limiting factors for it's range? Is there a
| critical nutrient that can be introduced?
| pvaldes wrote:
| > What are the limiting factors for it's range?
|
| Fishermen and recreational sports
| sandworm101 wrote:
| It is grass. It needs sunlight and a substrate on which to
| grow. That means shallow/clear water over a sandy bottom,
| not a common thing in the ocean.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Seems like sunlight and substrate is much more common
| than seagrass is. I found this paper [1] that talks about
| the difference.
|
| It estimated the area of suitable sunlight and substrate
| to be 4,320,000 km2 but estimated seagrass coverage of
| 177,000 km2.
|
| I think this big difference indicates that there are
| additional factors at play.
|
| https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab7d
| 06
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Earth has something like 150 million square kilometers of
| ocean. 4mil is a tiny corner of that area. Depth/light
| remains by far the primary limitation for sea grass,
| preventing it from even attempting to colonize the vast
| majority of the worlds oceans. Compare other carbon sinks
| like plankton which can exist across the ocean
| irrespective of water depth.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Sure, but Im not asking why seagrass doesn't cover the
| entire ocean or entire planet.
|
| I'm asking why it doesn't cover more area than it
| currently does it appears that light and substrate is an
| insufficient answer. 90% of the area with suitable light
| and substrate is not covered, so something additional is
| going on.
| dymk wrote:
| That's what https://www.runningtide.com/ is trying to do
| jerf wrote:
| "The research stated that if microorganisms consumed the
| sucrose stored by the roots of the seagrass, at least 1.54
| million tons of carbon dioxide would be released into the
| atmosphere, which is equivalent to the carbon emissions from by
| 330,000 cars in one year."
|
| Those number strongly suggest no. "A million tons" and
| "hundreds of thousands" may sound large but in this context
| they're tiny. And if we did try to farm these we'd have to
| displace other ecosystems for the farm land (under ocean).
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| >And if we did try to farm these we'd have to displace other
| ecosystems for the farm land (under ocean).
|
| but that isn't necessarily a problem.
| somishere wrote:
| There's a lot of work going into blue carbon efforts at the
| moment .. better understanding and utilising seagrasses and
| algaes, mangroves, etc. as carbon sinks.
|
| That said, what I've never understood about the potential of
| seagrass as a carbon sink (and this sugar thing might go
| someway to explaining it), is how it works given how short
| lived individual plants are, and how fragile - and shallow -
| seagrass ecosystems are.
|
| CO2 / methane (?) released by decaying biomass at depth may
| stay trapped in sediment, but how realistic is this at depths
| of 20-40m? Does anyone have any more info?
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(page generated 2022-05-23 23:00 UTC)