The Discovery Giving the Great Barrier Reef a Fighting Chance

It’s the discovery that could help “buffer” the Great Barrier Reef from a raft of climate change impacts, including ocean acidification.

Australian scientists have found the largest mass of a type of marine plant hailed for their ability to more efficiently and more powerfully remove carbon from the atmosphere.

The meadow of deep-water seagrass in the Great Barrier Reef is estimated to store 27.4 million tonnes of carbon.

“This is a really good news story,” Deakin University professor Peter Macreadie told SBS News.

“Whenever we find eco-systems that are drawing down lots of carbon, like the seagrass meadows, it is something to be really pleased about because what we’re doing is we’re finding eco-systems that have the ability to retire carbon from the carbon cycle, take it out of the atmospheric pool, take it out of the pool that is causing climate change, and retire it once again from the carbon cycle.

“It is the same process that created fossil fuels in the first place.”

The world’s most powerful carbon sink

For five years, researchers have known the special abilities of so-called “Blue Carbon” eco-systems such as salt marshes, mangroves, and shallow water seagrasses.

Dubbed the world’s most powerful carbon sink, the latter can remove carbon from the atmosphere at four times the rate of forests on land.

It can also store about 10 times more carbon compared to forests. All three ecosystems store more than half the ocean’s carbon, despite taking up less than one per cent of space on the sea floor. Climate change has already killed off the plant life. “In Australia, we know we’re losing these ecosystems at one to three per cent per year,” Professor Macreadie said. “And that lost carbon sink capacity - and the carbon that gets released when you destroy them - we estimate that is the equivalent of having an extra 10 million cars on the roads in Australia.”