Daniel KhentThe ocean makes half our oxygen and rainforests far less than the myth claims, yet both burn through nearly all of it. What we actually breathe is a deep-time inheritance of carbon that got buried before it could rot.
The ocean produces roughly half of Earth’s oxygen — not the rainforest, which uses up most of what it makes — through photosynthesis by phytoplankton, microscopic marine organisms so abundant that a single teaspoon of seawater can contain as many as a million of them.
About half of the oxygen on Earth comes from the ocean. Not from the rainforests, which consume close to as much oxygen as they make, but from phytoplankton, the microscopic algae and bacteria that drift through the sunlit surface of the sea and photosynthesise on a scale that is hard to picture. The figure is […]