Why Losing Seagrass Due to Warming Oceans is a Bad Thing. The Good News is Seagrass Can be Replanted, Although Difficulty. Advice: Maybe, it Should Be Done in More Temperate Waters? So, As Not to Have a Repeat, Die Off.

The Ocean Has Released an Insane Amount of CO2, And No One Even Noticed

Our planet's climate is built on a whole host of interlinked chemical reactions and counter-reactions, and we just learned about another: an underwater heatwave has triggered a worryingly huge release of CO2 from Amphibolis antarctica seagrass off north-western Australia.

From article, (Our planet's climate is built on a whole host of interlinked chemical reactions and counter-reactions, and we just learned about another: an underwater heatwave has triggered a worryingly huge release of CO2 from Amphibolis antarcticaseagrass off north-western Australia.

Vast tracts of these flowering marine plants were killed by the stress of living in waters that were 2-4 degrees Celsius (3.6-7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than normal back in the summer of 2010-2011, researchers have found.

More than a third of the seagrass meadows were potentially affected. And no one really noticed.

And the findings have very real implications for the kind of self-perpetuating heat rises we could be in for, say the international team of researchers, as too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere warms the planet and leads to the release of even more greenhouse gases.

 Losing seagrass is a double whammy for our environment's health – not only do we lose the plant's ability to capture and store CO2, all the CO2 that's already being stored gets released back out into the ecosystem.

"This is significant, as seagrass meadows are CO2 sinks, known as Blue Carbonecosystems," says one of the team, Pere Masqué from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB) in Spain.

"They take up and store carbon dioxide in their soils and biomass through biosequestration. The carbon that is locked in the soils is potentially there for millennia if seagrass ecosystems remain intact."

The Shark Bay region we're talking about is one of the largest remaining seagrass ecosystems on Earth – about 1.3 percent of all the CO2 stored by seagrass across the world is stored here.

Plans are now underway to work out how to help the area recover, perhaps by removing dead seagrass (which can hamper regrowth) and planting new seedlings.

Even so, it's important to emphasis the urgency in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and stopping adverse feedback loops like this from happening, say the researchers – otherwise dying seagrass will be giving up more CO2 than healthy seagrass can take back.)

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