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Updated: Jul 18, 2026

Unraveling the Unseen Players in the Ocean - A Field Guide to Water Chemistry and Marine Microbiology
Published on: November 5, 2014
Anthropogenic CO2 uptake by the ocean based on the global chlorofluorocarbon data set
Ben I McNeil1, Richard J Matear, Robert M Key
1Atmospheric and Oceanic Science Program, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA.
Abstract:
We estimated the oceanic inventory of anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) from 1980 to 1999 using a technique based on the global chlorofluorocarbon data set. Our analysis suggests that the ocean stored 14.8 petagrams of anthropogenic carbon from mid-1980 to mid-1989 and 17.9 petagrams of carbon from mid-1990 to mid-1999, indicating an oceanwide net uptake of 1.6 and 2.0 +/- 0.4 petagrams of carbon per year, respectively. Our results provide an upper limit on the solubility-driven anthropogenic CO2 flux into the ocean, and they suggest that most ocean general circulation models are overestimating oceanic anthropogenic CO2 uptake over the past two decades.
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