The Incredible Thing About Whale Poop Is That It Fights Climate
Change  Biologists say the majestic swimmers' "pump" mechanism
filters the oceans of carbon.  | Mon Jul. 7, 2014 1:48 PM EDT
This story originally appeared in CityLab and is republished
here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.  It's not a good
time to be living in the ocean. Aside from oil spills and the
scourge of plastics pollution, the seas are becoming ever more
acidic due to humanity's CO2 flooding the atmosphere. The
altered PH of the water makes for a bevy of problems, from
making fish act in really weird ways to dissolving the shells of
creatures critical to the marine food chain.  But a group of
scientists from the University of Vermont and elsewhere think
the ocean's future health has one thing going for it: the
restoration of whale populations. They believe that having more
whales in the water creates a more stable marine environment,
partly through something called a "whale pump"—a polite term for
how these majestic animals de