☔️ Water series: Interactions of flora with water and climate: Difference between revisions

Water has an even bigger role to play in atmospheric carbon sequestration, with oceans being the largest carbon sink, even though their annual sequestration is lower than the one of vegetation and soil combined. Here, no need for organic matter, as CO2 simply dissolves in sea water before to be transformed in diverse elements known as dissolved inorganic carbon (the “solubility pump”)<ref name="ghilsain" />. While it seems to be a good news for anthropogenic climate change, one of those inorganic carbon elements unfortunately is carbonic acid. It causes ocean acidification, which might have disastrous consequences on marine life by weakening shells of molluscs. Those shells are made of limestone, and the acidity of water dissolves it. If shell molluscs were to go extinct, this potential biomass collapse would result in a huge amount of carbon released. Even thought the scale of this acidification stays uncertain, and mitigation methods are experimented, studies suggested that the global warming of oceans might limit their sequestration capacity until they get saturated with carbonic acid.<ref name="wikisource" />