Large amounts of sugar have been found beneath seagrass meadows in the world’s oceans, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology report. Seagrass grasslands are among the ecosystems that capture the most carbon — just 1 square kilometer of seagrass can store about twice as much carbon as, and 35 times faster than, terrestrial forests, according to the institute. To better understand these carbon-capturing “masters,” scientists conducted research off the Italian island of Elba, taking samples of seagrass meadows and surrounding sediments. Their data showed that sugar concentrations under seagrass were at least 80 times higher than in other marine ecosystems. “To put this in perspective: we estimate that there are 600 to 1.3 million tonnes of sugar globally, mainly in the form of sucrose,” Manuel Liebeke, a scientist at the institute, said in a press release.
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