Antarctic Seafloor Life Is Locking Away a Lot of Carbon, Study Says

The loss of sea ice over Antarctic waters has caused certain forms of life to flourish on the seafloor, and those underwater communities
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An Antarctic icefish swimming over bryozoans
are acting as important and unexpected carbon sinks, according to research published in the journal Current Biology. Based on studies of West Antarctic bryozoans — aquatic invertebrates sometimes referred to as “moss animals” — researchers have found that those and other seafloor organisms could play important roles in accumulating and burying carbon, removing it from the atmosphere for an extremely long time. The researchers calculate that growth of the bryozoans has nearly doubled over the past 20 years, with the animals taking in more than 200,000 tons of carbon per year since the 1980s. Accounting for other undersea species, the researchers suggest that roughly 3 million tons of carbon are sequestered each year, equivalent to nearly 200 square miles of tropical rainforest.