Invisible comet tails of mucus slow sinking flakes of ‘marine snow’

WASHINGTON — Tiny, sinking flakes of detritus in the ocean fall more slowly thanks to the goop that surrounds each flake, new observations reveal.

The invisible mucus makes “comet tails” that surround each flake, physicist Rahul Chajwa of Stanford University reported November 19 at the American Physical Society’s Division of Fluid Dynamics meeting. Those mucus tails slow the speed at which the flakes fall. That could affect the rate at which carbon gets sequestered deep in the oceans, making the physics of this sticky goo important for understanding Earth’s climate.

Although scientists knew the goo was a component of the “marine snow” that falls in the ocean, they hadn’t

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