New research from UC San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the University of Lincoln shows that the stickiness of marine snow, the drifting clumps of dead plankton, fecal pellets, and mucus, plays a bigger role in ocean carbon storage than previously known. More viscous particles resist bacterial breakdown, sink deeper, and can transport over six times as much carbon to the deep ocean, where it stays isolated from the atmosphere for centuries. The findings come from a new imaging method that let scientists watch bacteria interact with individual marine snow particles for the first time. This matters because marine snow already moves about ten gigatons of carbon each year, but only about two gigatons reach deep water. If models can account for viscosity, predictions of the ocean's carbon sink may become more accurate. The work also opens new questions for biology, since mucus structure affects everything from coral reefs to the human gut, but the core result is a concrete step toward understanding a poorly measured part of the carbon cycle.
