Today, about half of the CO2 emitted due to fossil fuel burning and land use changes stays in the atmosphere, and the other half goes into land sinks and the ocean, in about the same parts if you look at a decade long average. Since the industrial revolution in 1750, the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide has risen from the pre-industrial level at 280 ppm to almost 400 ppm (2013), a more than 40% increase in some 260 years. The Ocean's net CO2 uptake has increased by about 1 Pg in the last 50 years due to anthropogenic increase of atmospheric CO2 levels this offsets the natural balance of CO2 production and uptake. What used to be a process in steady state (i.e., ocean emitted as much CO2 as it took up) is now changing on time scales of a few decades. Together these two major processes in the global carbon cycle have removed about 2- 2.5 Pg Carbon per year (last decade average). The biological carbon pump together with the physical carbon pump of the ocean constitutes the ocean's CO2 sink. ![]() ![]() It is a mechanism which sequesters carbon dioxide (CO2) from contact with the atmosphere for decades or hundreds or even millions of years, and even geological time-scales. The Biological Carbon Pump includes all those processes in the ocean that cause photosynthetically formed organic carbon (primary production) by phytoplankton to sink out of the sunlit surface layer (the euphotic zone) into the deep sea and eventually to the ocean floor.
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