Slime for the local weather, delivered by brown algae

Brown algae take up massive quantities of carbon dioxide from the air and launch elements of the carbon contained therein again into the surroundings in mucous type. This mucus is tough to interrupt down for different ocean inhabitants, thus the carbon is faraway from the environment for a very long time, as researchers now present. They reveal that the algal mucus referred to as fucoidan is especially liable for this carbon elimination and estimate that brown algae may thus take away as much as 550 million tons of carbon dioxide from the air yearly — virtually the quantity of Germany’s whole annual greenhouse gasoline emissions.