The ocean is one of the planet’s great carbon sinks, absorbing nearly a third of the atmosphere’s greenhouse gas emissions.
Swimming in its depths are the great whales, a population whose sheer physical mass allows them to exert an outsized influence on the ecosystem around them. While researchers have long suspected that whales are key players in the ocean’s carbon cycle, quantifying exactly how these animals alter the seas — and what we lost with their decimation a century ago — has proved difficult.
Now a group of scientists has taken that challenge on. A team of ecologists, biologists and oceanographers recently published one of the most comprehensive efforts yet to understand just how much carbon the great whales absorb from the ocean, and the value that presents in the fight against climate change.
