“Humanity is now conducting a great geochemical experiment that could not happen in the past, nor can it be repeated in the future. In just a few centuries, we will give back to the atmosphere and oceans all the organic carbon that has been around for hundreds of millions of years.” deposited in the rocks of the earth.
This is what ocean researcher Roger Revell and physicist Hans Suess wrote In a paper published in 1957Who studied the exchange of carbon dioxide between the atmosphere and the ocean. Even then it was known that the ever-increasing consumption of fossil fuels would have an impact on the world. In the early 20th century, Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius calculated quantitatively that certain compounds, such as carbon dioxide, act as greenhouse gases and heat the Earth.
The extent of this effect was not yet fully understood in the 1950s. Above all, the effect of the oceans as researched by Revell and Souss was unknown. His work resulted in a formula for the quantity known today as the “Revel Factor”:
Simply put, this factor describes the ratio of the relative change in dissolved carbon dioxide in seawater to the relative change in total carbon dissolved there (DIC or “dissolved inorganic carbon”). For chemical reasons, the extent to which gaseous carbon dioxide from the atmosphere can be stored in seawater depends, among other things, on how many carbon compounds are present there (and also on temperature and the water’s ability to bind acids). In other words: the lower the revel factor, the better the oceans can act as a storehouse of carbon dioxide.
