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Climate Science: Investigating Climatic and Environmental Processes- 1000 Year Scale
The oceans play a crucial role in the global carbon cycle because of their ability to sequester and release carbon from a variety of sources.

Figure of global carbon cycle from Berkeley National Lab
The figure above from the Berkeley National Lab details some of the carbon cycle's land and ocean processes that operate on a variety of time scales.

Figure A below shows the primary carbon reservoirs while figure B shows the exchange rates between reservoirs in gigatons per year.
Figure of carbon reservoirs in gigatons
Figure of carbon exchange rates
Two figures above from Ruddiman, 2001 used by permission of W. H. Freeman & Co.

See Climate change scenarios compel studies of ocean carbon storage for more.

 

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