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Burning oil, gas, and coal — literal fossil fuels, made from the compressed remains of ancient plants and plankton — has released carbon into Earth’s atmosphere, where it traps heat and alters the climate.

The testing at Las Virgenes Reservoir will help the company’s engineers check how the system works in filtering out plankton and discharging it back into the water.

Findings like Crichton’s might also provide a warning that a future climate could lack the deep-sea plankton necessary to sustain large deep-sea fish.

Millions of samples of plankton, fish eggs and marine animals have since been preserved in its archives, providing invaluable snapshots of the ocean over time.

This suggested that microscopic plankton living on the surface of the seas produce sulfur in the form of a gas, dimethyl sulphide, that once in the atmosphere, oxidizes and forms small particles called aerosols.