Concluding Remarks: Marine Photosynthesis and the Global Carbon Cycle

Abstract

The fate of C0₂ emitted from burning of fossil fuel, cement production, and deforestation since the industrial revolution is unknown and a hotly debated issue. Meteorologists, agronomists, terrestrial ecologists, limnologists, and oceanographers are at present unable to specify either the steady state annual fluxes of carbon in a global budget or the nature of transients between the major storage pools (atmosphere, land, and ocean) over the last century. At the present rate of increase in fuel consumption of 4.3% yr^-1, a doubling of the C0₂ content of the atmosphere and a concomitant 2 to 3°C increase in the ocean’s temperature could occur by 2035. Present ocean temperatures are, in fact, only ∼2.3°C warmer than during the last Wisconsin glaciation. The role of the marine biota has been dismissed as insignificant in the global C0₂ cycle on the basis of nutrient limitation, reflecting the bias of oceanographers, who study only the open ocean, and of marine biologists, who study only intracellular metabolism. The C02 fixed each year during photosynthesis on the continental shelf and deposited as detrital particles on the adjacent continental slope may be a major organic sink of the global carbon cycle that is amenable to manipulation by man in amelioration of the future C0₂ content of the atmosphere.

“Quite unexpectedly as Vasserot The armless ambidextrian was lighting A match between his great and second toe And Ralph the lion was engaged in biting The neck of Madame Sossman while the drum Pointed, and Teeny was about to cough In waltz-time swinging Jocko by the thumb — Quite unexpectedly the top blew off: And there... in the sudden blackness the black pall Of nothing, nothing, nothing — nothing at all.” (Archibald MacLeish, 1926)