A team of British and Australian scientists has explained the massive role that is being played by the Southern Ocean as an important carbon sink in the world.

They claim that the ocean is immensely serving the atmosphere by drawing down the carbon of it and further locking it beneath thousand kilometers wide. They added that it is the role of the eddies, the winds and the currents that carry warm and cold water around the ocean and helps in creating localized pathways or funnels for storage of carbon deep beneath.

It is really shocking to believe that the Southern Ocean, which does not absorb carbon but provides a big sink to almost 40 percent of the annual global CO2 emissions of the world’s oceans.

“The Southern Ocean is a large window by which the atmosphere connects to the interior of the ocean below. Until now we didn’t know exactly the physical processes of how carbon ends up being stored deep in the ocean”, said Dr. Jean-Baptiste Sallée, of British Antarctic Survey.

They added that the discovery of the mechanisms behind carbon sinking has added greatly to uncover the cause of changing climate and their effects.

Since the size of the ocean is massively huge and due to its remote location as well, scientists hired small robotic probes to explore the workings of the ocean, known as Argo floats.