New research shows that the amount of carbon dioxide being absorbed by the world’s oceans has significantly reduced. University of East Anglia researchers gauged CO2 absorption through more than 90,000 measurements from merchant ships equipped with automatic instruments during a 10-year study in the North Atlantic. The data shows CO2 uptake halved between the mid-90s and 2000 to 2005.The findings, published in a paper for the Journal of Geophysical Research, are surprising and worrying because global warming might accelerate more than predicted if the oceans soak up less of the greenhouse gas. It also poses a significant issue for new technologies that had hoped to use oceans as a CO2 sink. The findings suggest that in time the ocean might become saturated with humanity’s emissions and the carbon cycle will become dysfunctional and fail.
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