Sugar Beneath the Ocean

Many coastal areas around the world are home to lush green meadows — all thanks to seagrasses.

As the only flowering plants growing in marine environments, these meadows are magic: One square kilometer of seagrass stores nearly twice as much carbon as land-based forests, and it does so 35 times faster. This makes seagrasses one of the most efficient global sinks of carbon dioxide on Earth.

And this isn't the only remarkable thing about them, a new study has revealed. Submerged beneath the waves, seagrass ecosystems hold colossal reserves of sugar we never knew existed before, with roughly 32 billion cans of Coca-Cola's worth of sweet stuff hiding in the seabed.

Naturally, this holds major implications for mitigating climate change and carbon storage.

Sweet, sweet seagrass
Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen, Germany, reported in a study published in the journal Nature Eco­logy & Evol­u­tion that seagrasses release colossal amounts of sugar into their soils, which is also known as the rhizosphere. Under the seagrass, sugar concentrations were unexpectedly at least 80 times higher than previously measured in marine environments.  READ MORE...