Modeling Atmosphere-Ocean Interactions and Primary Productivity

Abstract

The heat budget, and hence the climate of the Earth, is sensitive to changes in the atmospheric greenhouse gas composition. Next to water vapor, carbon dioxide (CO₂) is the most important atmospheric greenhouse gas affecting the Earth’s radiative balance. Greenhouse gases raise the mean temperature of the Earth by absorbing and trapping long-wave radiation from the planet surface that would otherwise be lost to space.

The strength of our food chain, regardless of the number of its links, must be dependent on that first fundamental link which joins it organically to the inorganic elements of which all living forms are composed, elements which are unavailable until woven into living tissue on the mysterious loom of the chlorophyll-bearing plant. And this, in the entire aquatic world, is par excellence the diatoms. Mann 1921