On top of everything else our oceans provide, they have absorbed, on average, about 25% of anthropogenic CO2 emitted from the early 1960s to the late 2010s.
This carbon has been stored in mostly inorganic forms. Just as a player gets tired toward the end of a match, this type of storage becomes less and less effective as atmospheric CO2 concentrations increase.
Though the organic carbon stored in marine ecosystems is much smaller than the inorganic component, “blue carbon” could be a long-term, valuable teammate when it comes to climate change.
Blue carbon in tropical, coastal environments, like mangroves, saltmarshes, or seagrass meadows, has received much attention…
but what do we know about blue carbon at the other ends of the globe?
Climate change is happening faster in the polar regions (the Arctic and Southern Oceans) than anywhere else on earth.
These rapid changes make it hard for us to predict what will happen to future carbon sequestration.
Physical changes , like rising temperatures, an influx of glacial meltwater, sea-level rise, changes in underwater light, increasing acidity, deoxygenation, and sea-ice loss are coupled with…
These changes are combining to create never before seen marine communities and habitats - called emerging novel ecosystems.
Emerging novel ecosystems on land mean the Arctic is becoming less white and more green and carbon stores are increasing.
We expect something similar will happen in the polar oceans. They might even store more carbon than terrestrial systems!
If this is true, it means we should preserve, restore, and even enhance these natural marine processes to help mitigate climate change.
While this might make a good story, it isn’t so simple and this hypothesis is far from confirmed.
Even if it is correct, and we gain new carbon-capturing, novel ecosystems at the poles…
What other changes do they bring to the marine environment?
How long will that carbon storage actually last?
What do we lose from the unique habitats and communities they replace?
How do we determine who the geographic winners and losers of climate change will be?
Understanding the dynamic world of carbon is also important because legacy carbon - our “oceanic trust fund” - has been slowly building up over thousands of years.
We have a good understanding of the pathways carbon takes as it accumulates in this trust fund, but the sequestration time of polar blue carbon, and how it will be impacted by climate change and emerging novel ecosystems, is not well understood.
SEA-Quester will collect more data so we can better predict how changing flows and stocks in one part of the carbon cycle will affect other parts of the ecosystem.
This won’t be easy - carbon isn’t just in a hypothetical trust fund. Carbon is moving in the real world between coastal, pelagic, and benthic environments and in real-time - past, present, and future!
Join our team as we dive into the world of polar blue carbon!
Researchers with the SEA-Quester project, funded by the HorizonEurope programme, are hard at work…
identifying present day polar blue carbon stocks,
improving our understanding and modeling the processes that control these stocks, and how they might change in the future,
estimating the long-term potential of polar blue carbon sequestration and storage,
and quantifying the interacting effects of climate change, ocean chemistry, and stressors like pollution on carbon sequestration.
Our work includes field sampling …
remote sensing (satellite imagery),
examining marine sediment cores to reconstruct past climates,
and combining these data to model the underlying processes that drive system changes - not just using current conditions to predict future ones.
No carbon molecule is fated to play in the ocean forever!
But whether carbon is stored for a few days or a few millennia, SEA-Quester wants to shed light on how long, how fast, how much, and where polar blue carbon storage is happening in our changing climate.
Polar blue carbon won’t be the only answer to solving the climate crisis - reducing emissions is still the most important part of the equation.
However, when decisions are being made about our polar seas: which areas to protect, which areas to fish, whether to support more tourism here or less marine shipping there..
carbon is now a key player in those decisions - big or small.
Some people want polar blue carbon to be a mitigation tool, some see it as a scientific puzzle to solve, others want better maps, better models, or better information about polar blue carbon where they live…
Explore our website to help discover what YOU want from polar blue carbon!
On top of everything else our oceans provide, they have absorbed, on average, about 25% of anthropogenic CO2 emitted from the early 1960s to the late 2010s.
This carbon has been stored in mostly inorganic forms. Just as a player gets tired toward the end of a match, this type of storage becomes less and less effective as atmospheric CO2 concentrations increase.
Though the organic carbon stored in marine ecosystems is much smaller than the inorganic component, “blue carbon” could be a long-term, valuable teammate when it comes to climate change.
Blue carbon in tropical, coastal environments, like mangroves, saltmarshes, or seagrass meadows, has received much attention…
but what do we know about blue carbon at the other ends of the globe?
Climate change is happening faster in the polar regions (the Arctic and Southern Oceans) than anywhere else on earth.
These rapid changes make it hard for us to predict what will happen to future carbon sequestration.
Physical changes , like rising temperatures, an influx of glacial meltwater, sea-level rise, changes in underwater light, increasing acidity, deoxygenation, and sea-ice loss are coupled with…
These changes are combining to create never before seen marine communities and habitats - called emerging novel ecosystems.
Emerging novel ecosystems on land mean the Arctic is becoming less white and more green and carbon stores are increasing.
We expect something similar will happen in the polar oceans. They might even store more carbon than terrestrial systems!
If this is true, it means we should preserve, restore, and even enhance these natural marine processes to help mitigate climate change.
While this might make a good story, it isn’t so simple and this hypothesis is far from confirmed.
Even if it is correct, and we gain new carbon-capturing, novel ecosystems at the poles…
What other changes do they bring to the marine environment?
How long will that carbon storage actually last?
What do we lose from the unique habitats and communities they replace?
How do we determine who the geographic winners and losers of climate change will be?
Understanding the dynamic world of carbon is also important because legacy carbon - our “oceanic trust fund” - has been slowly building up over thousands of years.
We have a good understanding of the pathways carbon takes as it accumulates in this trust fund, but the sequestration time of polar blue carbon, and how it will be impacted by climate change and emerging novel ecosystems, is not well understood.
SEA-Quester will collect more data so we can better predict how changing flows and stocks in one part of the carbon cycle will affect other parts of the ecosystem.
This won’t be easy - carbon isn’t just in a hypothetical trust fund. Carbon is moving in the real world between coastal, pelagic, and benthic environments and in real-time - past, present, and future!
Join our team as we dive into the world of polar blue carbon!
Researchers with the SEA-Quester project, funded by the HorizonEurope programme, are hard at work…
identifying present day polar blue carbon stocks,
improving our understanding and modeling the processes that control these stocks, and how they might change in the future,
estimating the long-term potential of polar blue carbon sequestration and storage,
and quantifying the interacting effects of climate change, ocean chemistry, and stressors like pollution on carbon sequestration.
Our work includes field sampling … remote sensing (satellite imagery), examining marine sediment cores to reconstruct past climates, and combining these data to model the underlying processes that drive system changes - not just using current conditions to predict future ones.
No carbon molecule is fated to play in the ocean forever!
But whether carbon is stored for a few days or a few millennia, SEA-Quester wants to shed light on how long, how fast, how much, and where polar blue carbon storage is happening in our changing climate.
Polar blue carbon won’t be the only answer to solving the climate crisis - reducing emissions is still the most important part of the equation.
However, when decisions are being made about our polar seas: which areas to protect, which areas to fish, whether to support more tourism here or less marine shipping there..
carbon is now a key player in those decisions - big or small.
Some people want polar blue carbon to be a mitigation tool, some see it as a scientific puzzle to solve, others want better maps, better models, or better information about polar blue carbon where they live…
Explore our website to help discover what YOU want from polar blue carbon!