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For three months the Antarctic Circumnavigation Expedition will circumnavigate Antarctica, researching different aspects of the biology, physics and chemistry of the Southern Ocean. The researcher in this article is concerned with phytoplankton. Phytoplankton primary production forms the base of marine food webs, and through a process called the "biological pump" a fraction of the roughly 45 billion tons of carbon fixed by phytoplankton every year sinks out of the surface layer, and is stored in the deep ocean away from the atmosphere. [Source: The Conversation]
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