Although they’re easily ignored, seagrasses have been found to be one of the greatest carbon sinks on the planet. The study, published in Nature Geosciences, reveals that they can store up to 83,000 metric tons of carbon per square kilometer.
For a change, the average forest can only store 30,000 tons of carbon per square kilometer, so do the math. Over 10 percent of all the carbon that the ocean buries every year is stored by seagrasses, although they occupy only 0.2 percent of the world’s oceans.
Well, the entire process is helped by the soil that the grass is anchored in, where the carbon forms deposits several meters deep, and do this for thousands of years.
The bad news is that each year about 1.5 percent of the existing seagrass is being destroyed by pollution and dredging. Over 29 percent of all seagrass has been destroyed so far, and if we don’t stop and care we’ll cause as much damage as we cause by cutting the rainforest or any other forest, for that matter.
Not to mention the damages done to the flora and fauna that lives in the seagrass meadows everywhere.
