How many times have you heard that the great forests are “The planet’s lungs”? In 2019, the Amazon burned, and we all cried out to the sky that our oxygen supply was being destroyed. Well, this is not entirely true.
It is sure that the Amazon rainforest is home to 10% of the species of animals and plants on planet Earth and that its loss would be an incalculable environmental disaster. The Amazon, along with other forests such as the Taiga, the Jiuzhaigou Valley, and the Daintree rainforest, among many others, absorb a large part of the Co2 and emit a fair percentage of oxygen.
Still, the legend is not valid, and it is not true that they are the planet’s lungs. The true respiratory organ is blue and not green. It is the ocean.
As you can learn in documentaries like “Seaspiracy,” the new documentary that talks about ocean pollution, among many other things, seaweed is capable of absorbing 20 times more carbon than forests. 93% of the world’s CO2 is stored in the oceans thanks to corals and algae. Losing 1% of this system is equivalent to releasing 97 million tons of carbon into the atmosphere.
At the same time that these marine plants absorb most of the Co2, they, in turn, produce between 50 and 83% of the oxygen emitted to the earth’s surface through photosynthesis.
The international project Tara Oceans concluded that phytoplankton generates about 270 billion tons per year, which is equivalent to half the oxygen that humans breathe, and transfers ten gigatons of carbon from the atmosphere to the depths of the ocean.
Due to overfishing or pollution in the oceans, the consequences of marine plants’ systematic death are directly related to global warming. The sea cools the atmosphere, but if the sea dies, it cannot do this function, so the result causes more heat on the earth’s surface, more probability of fires, thousands of dead animals, and finally, the shortage of food and oxygen to the human being.
The same happens when we talk about rivers, they have the same function as the oceans.
All living beings on the planet are connected in one way or another, that is why at SUSTONABLE, we convert plastic waste into recycled and recyclable surfaces. In this way, we eliminate a part of the pollution of seas and rivers.
Come and join us in the Eco revolution!
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