The dramatic, glacier-carved inlets called fjords capture and store carbon better than open-water marine systems, report researchers.
“Carbon sequestration is the big buzzword, but we’re still getting a handle on how it works,” says Thomas Bianchi, a geochemist at the University of Florida. In order to make informed land-use decisions and accurate climate predictions, “finding and understanding these hot spots is critical,” he says.
Although fjords represent a tiny fraction of the seas, they store 11 percent of the carbon buried in the oceans—an estimated 18 million metric tons a year, according to the study in Nature Geosciences.
It's amazing that systems that are so small can have such a huge global impact.
