The ocean plays a massive role in keeping Earth’s climate in check. One particular marine layer, known as the twilight zone, is key to moving carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and into the depths of the ocean.
One way that happens involves a long, daily trek made by countless species that call the twilight zone home. At night, fish and other creatures make their way thousands of meters up toward the surface to feed on microscopic plants that spent the day soaking up sunlight and carbon dioxide. While they do so, predators take the opportunity to hunt down smaller prey. Thus begins a chain of carbon transfer — from phytoplankton to tiny fish to squid, for example.
At sunrise, the creatures make their way back to the twilight zone to hide from predators until repeating the process the next evening.
“It is this huge, coordinated dance that all of these organisms go on every single day,” said Morgan Raven, an organic geochemist and geobiologist at the University of California Santa Barbara.
Some of the carbon — like waste from the animals or decaying bodies — drifts toward the bottom of the ocean where it can stay for “centuries to millennia,” according to a new report from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod in Massachusetts.
Yet in the face of indiscriminate fossil fuel use, scientists warn that this dazzling daily marine show and the many other ways that the ocean helps take in our excess carbon emissions is at significant risk of disruption due to the myriad threats of climate change.
Animation by Megan McGrew and Isabella Isaacs-Thomas, based on “The Ocean Twilight Zone’s Role in Climate Change,” a 2022 report from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
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