Plant life covering the surface of the world's oceans, a vital resource that
helps absorb the worst of the "greenhouse gases" involved in global warming, is
disappearing at a dangerous rate, scientists have discovered.
Satellites and seagoing ships have confirmed the diminishing productivity of the
microscopic plants, which oceanographers say is most striking in the waters of
the North Pacific -- ranging as far up as the high Arctic.
Whether the lost productivity of the plants, called phytoplankton, is directly
due to increased ocean temperatures that have been recorded for at least the
past 20 years remains part of an extremely complex puzzle, says Watson W. Gregg,
a NASA biologist at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., but it
surely offers a fresh clue to the controversy over climate change.
According to Gregg, the greatest loss of phytoplankton has occurred where ocean
temperatures have ...