Nature Wants To Push Back Against Fossil Fool Age CO2 On This Blue Planet

Microscopic marine plants bioengineer the oceans to make their ocean pastures suitable for their own growth

Those phytoplankton are the bottom of the food chain and feed all of ocean life

But they are in a desperate state of decline due to our CO2 preventing vital mineral micronutrients from reaching the ocean pastures. We can and must help them save us from ills of our fossil fool emissions.

When the earth was just a few billion years old, barely cool enough to support oceans of water, the first life for a billion years were simple bacteria. They must have found their bacterial ‘book club’ and ‘bridge club’ meetings were getting far to boring as they decided to evolve and begin to produce oxygen, which was missing on the planet. Over the eons, the oxygen levels rose and this empowered evolution to try all manner of ideas for new life. It didn’t take too long for the ‘book and bridge club’ conversations to improve.

Stony cocolithophores are prominent phytoplankton, their shells are made up of calcium carbonate, just like an oyster shell. During their short life, they make lots of oil that keeps them afloat. But soon the shell outweighs the buoyancy of the oil and its the deep six for them. Click to read more

Phytoplankton, the grass of ocean pastures, forms the base of the marine food chain. They, of course, do this using photosynthesis and CO2 to make an abundance of themselves. This ocean pasture forage is grazed upon by all manner of animal life. As the tiny phytoplankton are so delicious they, in turn, have evolved countless tricks to try to survive.

One of the best of Nature’s evolutionary tricks is to grow shells and spines out of minerals so those tiny monsters, zooplankton trying to eat them, find them a difficult mouthful. But growing a shell out of minerals is essentially building a stone house around oneself. It has its downside, deep deep downside.

If you are a fortressed phytoplankton trying to stay floating in the surface ocean where there is plenty of sunlight eventually you lose as you and your shell sink like the stone you have become into the dark abyss.

The geological formation of which the White Cliffs of Dover are a part is composed of trillions of tonnes of the calcium-rich shells of ocean plankton. The ocean basification that resulted has kept the oceans in the Goldilocks Zone. Click to read more

Much of the CO2 in our blue planet’s atmosphere eventually turns into the shells and carcasses of phytoplankton.  Most is phytoplankton that when buried in the seabed eventually becomes chalk, a form of limestone. The most famous deposits of this are the white cliffs of Dover.

Ocean Basification

The presence of such deposits is more than just beautiful, they are made of CO2 that instead of becoming deadly ocean acid instead became new life. When that life moved on it deposited the deadly acid-forming CO2 as basic chalk. This reservoir of carbon dioxide remains safely locked for all time.

Many organisms, including ourselves, use calcium carbonate for their endo/exo-skeletons. Luckily microscopic organisms far outnumber the rest of us make hard parts made of this material.

Large growths of the phytoplankton that deposit calcium carbonate, called “coccolithophorids”, can be seen from space; their blooms are so large that the white chalky plates, the “coccoliths”, reflect light that is sensed by satellites. Why they make this material has baffled scientists for decades.

Large cocolithophore blooms often occur in the ocean just south of the British Isles. The tiny floating ocean pasture plants take CO2 out of the air 1000 times more efficiently than a forest.

While it is certain that the plates help protect the organisms, which are only some five-millionth of a meter in diameter, grazing zooplankton, some skeptic/cynic have tried to belittle their effectiveness at removing CO2 suggesting that making calcium carbonate may enhance the supply of carbon dioxide in the seawater. Evidence for the latter idea has been well refuted.

But a new idea developed by a team lead by Swansea University Prof. Kevin Flynn provides an alternative explanation, which – even if it is not the basis for the evolution of coccolith production – must affect the ecology of these Earth-shaping organisms.

It’s a balancing act

During photosynthesis, phytoplankton removes carbon dioxide from the water and the acidity of the water then decreases. Remember that H2O+CO2=H2CO3 (carbonic acid). This decrease (an increase in pH) is basification, the opposite of acidification. Humanities fossil fool age is causing ocean acidification through excess carbon dioxide from burning coal, oil and gas dissolving in the seawater.

Neither basification nor acidification is good for phytoplankton growth, but while ocean acidification is largely human-made, basification during phytoplankton growth is perfectly natural and is something that all phytoplankton must be and are perfectly evolved to endure.

Pico The Cocolithophore Explains The Rules For Life On This Blue Planet!

Calcification, as is seen in the blooming of coccoliths, removes carbon dioxide, as does photosynthesis. However, the chemistry behind calcification leads in total to a decrease in pH: it causes an acidification event. During the Swansea research, the scientists used mathematical models of the growth of coccolithophorids to test the theory that basification caused by photosynthesis would be offset acidification, including that caused by calcification. The result of such an effect would be a stable pH that promoted coccolithophorid growth. The models confirmed that the ratio of photosynthesis to calcification predicted was a good match for that seen in the real organisms. It seems Mother Nature is a pretty good cook.

Coccolithophorids do not do what most other organisms do, take what they need and throw waste out that damages their environment for the next generation. These organisms constantly work as a vital part of the ecology to sustain their environment, they also help by mopping up the waste of others by countering both acidification and basification. They make the seawater in which they live a more stable environment.