Oceanic Carbon Pumps

The ocean has many tools to take particles (filled with carbon) in the surface ocean and transport them to depth, where that carbon remains out of contact with the atmosphere for 100s-1000s of years.

Fig. 1
Schematic of the different way particles get transported from the surface to depth in the ocean. From Boyd et. al. 2019 (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1098-2)

Biological Gravitational Pump (BGP)

Mixed-layer Pump (MLP)

Large Scale Physical Pump (LSP)

Eddy-subduction Pump (ESP)

Seasonal Lipid Pump (SLP)

Mesopelagic-migrant Pump (MMP)