Snowing in the Deep

The Climate Translation · Nov 5, 2026 · 18m · transcript

What if one of the ocean’s most important climate processes depends on something as simple as how sticky a tiny particle is?

In this episode of The Climate Translation, Dr. Mac explores marine snow, the constant fall of dead plankton, waste, mucus, and other organic material from the sunlit ocean into the deep. These sinking particles are part of the biological carbon pump, a natural process that moves carbon away from the atmosphere and can store some of it in the deep ocean for centuries or longer.

The episode also looks at new research showing that the viscosity, or “gooeyness,” of marine…