Read the full story from Stellenbosch University.
Based on the most comprehensive winter study to date, conducted in the Southern Ocean during July and August 2017, scientists were able to show that phytoplankton were indeed active during the icy cold and dark winter months. These findings are important for predictive global climate models, which currently are based predominantly on spring and summer seasons. With the addition of data from winter, the models can now better represent the atmosphere-to-ocean carbon transfer cycle over seasons. For scientists, this is a step forward in analyzing the sensitivity of this transfer to climate change.
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