There Are Mountains of Sugar Hidden in The Ocean, And We've Only Just Found Out

According to new research, the ocean has vast reserves of sugar hidden below the waves.

There are major implications for carbon storage and climate change because scientists have discovered that the ocean floor can hold huge amounts of the sweet stuff underneath the waving fronds.

The main ingredient of sugar used in the kitchen is sucrose, which is released from the seagrasses into the soil underneath. It means the sugar concentration on the ocean is 80 times higher than it would be normally.

According to the research team, seagrasses could be sitting on up to 1.3 million tons of sugar. That is enough for about 32 billion cans of Coca-Cola, so we are talking about a lot of hidden sugar.

Nicole Dubilier is a marine microbiologist from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Germany.

The plants use most of the light for their own growth. They lease the excess sugar into their rhizosphere. Think of it as a flow valve.

This excess sugar is not eaten by the organisms in the surrounding environment. It seems that seagrasses send out the same compounds as other plants do.

Red wine, coffee, and fruit are some of the places where these chemical compounds are found.

The researchers used a mass spectrometry technique to confirm their hypothesis in an actual underwater field.

There are seagrasses on the ocean. There is a marine sciences company calledHYDRA Marine Sciences.

In our past, we ad&xAD;ded phen­olics from the seagrass to thecroor.

When no phenolics were present, much less sucrose was conduced.

The researchers think that the microbes are giving something back to the seagrass in return for the food they grow.

Seagrasses are some of the planet's most important sinks for blue carbon, as they can suck up twice as much carbon as a forest of the same size on land.

Scientists can now factor in the sucrose deposits as well as the seagrass to calculate carbon capture loss, which is one of the most threatened habitats on the planet due to human activity and decreasing water quality.

We don't know as much about seagrass as we do about land-based hab.

Our study shows that one of the most critical aspects of coastalical hab­ is its susceptibility to coastal storms.

The research has been published.