5 hours agoShareSaveVictoria Gill, Kate Stephens and Gwyndaf HughesBBC News Science teamShareSaveGetty ImagesDr Carlos Preckler, from King Abdullah University in Saudi Arabia, is leading this part of the research and will be trying to measure how almost a century of industrial whaling in Antarctica affected the ocean and our atmosphere.Carbon – when it is released into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide – warms up our planet like a blanket. So, as the world struggles to reduce those emissions, any processes that absorb and lock significant amounts of carbon might help to rein in global warming. “We know whales have a lot of carbon in their bodies, because they are huge animals,” said Dr Preckler. What he and his colleagues want to know is how much of that carbon gets buried in the seafloor – and locked away from the atmosphere – when the animals die.”We can measure whale DNA and the carbon in the sediment,” explained Dr Preckler. “So we can measure what happened before industrial whaling removed most of the whales in the [Southern] ocean,” he added.That, the researchers say, will provide a measure of how much whales – simply by existing, being huge and living out their natural lives – remove carbon from our atmosphere and help in the fight against climate change. …
