‘Ocean engineers': How warm temperatures impact whales and the oxygen in the air

The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has continued to accelerate, increasing by a .

Trees, plants and tiny plankton in the ocean all convert CO2 into the oxygen we breathe, but scientists say they’re not able to keep up with all the ongoing pollution from 150 years of burning coal, oil and gas.

National climate reporter Chase Cain traveled to Antarctica to show how whales and their microscopic neighbors help maintain a critical balance.

Scientists from the study mammals which have been on earth millions of years before humans and do a very important job.

"Whales are almost like our ocean engineers," said Chloe Lew, a biological research field technician at California Ocean Alliance. "What the whales do is they actually excrete — as we all do, as all animals do ... at the surface of the ocean… with these essential nutrients that phytoplankton need to photosynthesize. All of this is relevant in terms of carbon sequestration and mitigating climate change."

Research from the , or NOAA, shows ocean phytoplankton pull as much carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere as — largely thanks to whales.

Despite that, global CO2 levels continue soaring because of pollution from coal, oil and gas.

So what happens when that becomes too much? That’s part of this research.

Lew and Lauren Fritz, a PhD student in marine mammal ecology at the University of California Santa Cruz, use their drone to measure the whale’s overall health before it dives for food.

Lew and Fritz collect small biopsies using a specially-designed crossbow which creates minimal impact on the whales.

"We always watch the whale’s behavior, and it's important to know when to take your shot," Lew said.

They analyze the biopsies aboard the ship to understand the full weight of climate change on whales’ health — everything from rapidly melting sea ice to dwindling populations of krill, their food.

"Basically, if the planet continues to warm and we get less sea ice, krill abundance is going to drop," Fritz said. "That’s gonna affect their ability to support ecosystems in other parts of the world because of how much they migrate."

NOAA research shows it would take the average tree more than 1500 years to sequester the amount of carbon dioxide a whale can in a single year.

And even after their long lives, whales’ benefit to our planet continues for centuries.

"Most whales will die at sea. Their bodies will sink to the bottom of the ocean — we refer to that as a whale fall," Lew said. "And so that is huge amounts of carbon that is then sequestered to the deep ocean, and it becomes almost an oasis for life on the seafloor."

"It is all very interconnected," Fritz said. "I just know it behooves us to make the oceans a more hospitable place for whales because of all that they do for the climate.