The collapse and recovery potential of carbon sequestration by baleen whales in the Southern Ocean
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Limiting climate warming below 2°C requires both reducing anthropic greenhouse gas emissions and sequestering more atmospheric carbon. Natural Climate Solutions (NCS) rely on the ability of ecosystems to capture and store carbon. Despite the important role of marine megafauna on the ocean carbon cycle, its potential as a NCS has not yet been explored. Here, we quantify the amount of carbon potentially sequestered by five baleen whale species across the Southern Hemisphere between 1890 and 2100 through both the sinking of carcasses after natural death and the fertilisation of phytoplankton by nutrients in faeces. At their pre-exploitation abundances, the five whales could sequester 10.6 106 tonnes of carbon per year (tC.yr-1) but this natural carbon sink was reduced at 2 106 tC.yr-1 in 1965 due to commercial whaling. However, the restoration of whale populations could sequester 8.7 106 tC.yr-1 at the end of the 21st century suggesting an efficient but neglected NCS that remains to be estimated globally including all marine vertebrates.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".