JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
The world is connected in strange ways, including some that kind of gross us out. Here's one - there is a link between climate change and mucus at the bottom of the ocean. NPR's Lauren Sommer has more on the tiny creatures that help slow the pace of climate change.
LAUREN SOMMER, BYLINE: When humans first went to the deep ocean and turned on a light, they saw something they didn't expect. They peered into the water and...
MANU PRAKASH: Reported out of a tiny little portal that it's snowing outside, but it's underwater.
SOMMER: Manu Prakash is a bioengineering professor at Stanford University. He says what they saw is marine snow - drifting particles that fill the water. It's basically the leftovers from the world above. The top of the ocean is full of tiny organisms like plankton and algae. When they die, their bodies stick together, along with poop and bacteria - whatever's around.
PRAKASH: And this massive amount of biomass makes tiny little globs, and this little glob then will eventually sink.
SOMMER: Some makes it all the way to the bottom of the ocean, where it stays put for thousands of years. This conveyor belt to the deep is incredibly important, Prakash says, because it's carrying carbon dioxide, which comes from the surface. The ocean soaks up carbon from the air like a sponge, including some of the pollution from our cars and power plants.
PRAKASH: Every year, between 30- to 40% of all carbon that we're emitting, the ocean absorbs it.
SOMMER: Plankton use that carbon to grow. Then, when they die and sink, their carbon comes with them to the sea floor, locking it away and preventing it from heating up the planet. If it weren't for these tiny organisms, the world would be a lot hotter than it is today, Prakash says.
PRAKASH: The small stuff controls the big stuff. On our planet, that's a rule that we should think about - that the small stuff really matters.
SOMMER: So understanding how that small stuff sinks is key for understanding how the climate will change. Prakash and his colleagues studied the particles with a special microscope and found it doesn't work quite the way scientists thought it did.
PRAKASH: The biggest surprise that we found was the fact that they don't sink like any normal objects.
SOMMER: That's because of mucus. Yeah, just like humans, algae and bacteria make snot too, and it slows the particles down.
PRAKASH: It acts like a parachute, and that's really one of the worrisome results here, is that you can stall some of the particles that are sinking.
SOMMER: That could mean not as much carbon gets locked away at the sea floor as we thought because the slower the particles sink, the more they get eaten up or decompose on their way down. This new data could give scientists a better idea of how much the ocean is helping with climate change. Colleen Durkin is an oceanographer at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute.
COLLEEN DURKIN: We do not have a very accurate estimate of how much stuff is getting to the bottom of the ocean.
SOMMER: And that amount could shift in the future, she says, as climate change heats up the ocean.
DURKIN: We know that the ecosystems are changing and that this process might also be changing.
SOMMER: All of this will help predict how hot the planet could get. Because everyone's future depends, in some part, on tiny clumps of dead stuff sinking to the bottom of the sea.
Lauren Sommer, NPR News.
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