The Planet’s Largest Carbon Sink Is Reaching Its Limits
Climate change discussions usually focus on what is happening above the water: rising temperatures, heatwaves, melting glaciers, sea-level rise. But roughly a quarter to a third of all the carbon dioxide humanity emits never reaches the atmosphere or remains there. It dissolves into the ocean. For decades, this has slowed the pace of global warming considerably — without the ocean acting as a vast carbon sink, temperatures would already be higher than they are.