About

The Biological Carbon Pump is a natural reservoir of carbon in our Earth System. It stores carbon in the ocean by plankton (microscopic plants) taking up CO2 as they grow in the surface ocean. The sinking remains of these plankton carry the carbon into the deep ocean locking it away for hundreds to thousands of years. This carbon pool is equivalent in size to the anthropogenically-driven increase in atmospheric CO2 over the 20th century. The Biological Carbon Pump is widely expected to be sensitive to environmental change and could therefore release CO2 in the future. However, we have limited knowledge of what those changes might be and why because we don’t have the necessary outputs from the state-of-the-art future projections by Earth System Models that underpin the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports that inform social, economic and political decisions about Climate Change.

PREdicting biological Carbon in the Ocean Globally (PRECOG) is a team of experts at the University of Liverpool comprehensively exploring the future of the Biological Carbon Pump using state-of-the-art Earth System Model projections. PRECOG will strategically align with an international network of researchers and industry partners to build a new knowledge framework that will inform future IPCC reports and mitigation strategies.

PRECOG will:

1) Derive new standard quantitative measures of the Biological Carbon Pump in a future changing ocean.

2) Quantify how and why the Biological Carbon Pump changes in state-of-the-art future projections that underpin the IPCC reports.

3) Determine the long-term impact of the Biological Carbon Pump beyond the year 2100 using new Earth System Model simulations.

4) Predict which future projections of the Biological Carbon Pump are most likely and how this might impact schemes to artificially enhance carbon storage by combining future projections with new compilations of observations.