One of the largest unknowns about global warming is, How much of an overload of man-made carbon dioxide can the Earth take? And the answer to that question probably lies in large part in the deep salt waters that cover approximately 71 percent of the planet. The oceans are the largest global-storage reservoirs of carbon on Earth besides rocks, and our first line of defense in any short-term process affected by human interference. “We have so little idea at this point of what goes on in 90 percent of the depth of the ocean,” says Ann Pearson, an assistant professor of biogeochemistry in Harvard’s Earth and Planetary Sciences Department. ‘We’re trying to get … baseline knowledge of what kinds of organisms live there and what they do if we’re going to have any prayer of really being able to say what’s going to happen in the short term.” Pearson is studying archaea, part of the domain of single-celled, nucleus-free microscopic organisms called prokaryotes, one of the three branches of life on Earth, along with eubacteria and eukaryotes.
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