Or maybe we need those deep sea fish after all:

http://qz.com/216826/fish-can-slow-down-global-warming-but-not-if-we-keep-eating-them/
“… Until now, scientists have chalked it up mainly to gravity—to the sinking of phytoplankton that have either died or been eaten and excreted by fish. But new research reveals that we have deep-sea fish to thank for transferring a lot of that carbon into the depths—and that sinking alone wouldn’t do the trick.

In fact, bottom-dwellers transfer more than a million tonnes of CO2 a year from surface waters of the UK and Ireland, … says a new study (paywall) by a University of Southampton team. Killing too many of those fishes, as well as the ones they feed on, risks damaging the ocean’s ability to store carbon, leaving more CO2 in the atmosphere….”

http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/281/1787/20140669.abstract
“… mid-water and bentho-pelagic-feeding demersal fishes play an important role in the ocean carbon cycle, bypassing the detrital particle flux and transferring carbon to deep long-term storage. “

A good amount of the oil and gas used over the last century, for example, is the product of an anoxic Tethys ocean which produced what later came to nearer the surface in places like the Arabian Peninsula and the oil and gas in the mountain ranges and valleys east of that region in, for example, Pakistan.

A great recent work that covers this and much more … the long geological view of the quarter of the globe of concern, is here: http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2012/12/17/the-amazing-and-compelling-story-of-the-tethys-sea/

What? Citation for that? I’d thought primary productivity was expected to collapse along with the ecosystems?

We’ve only known about prochlorococcus since 1989, and it’s the reason we’re breathing — are you assuming a mass extinction wouldn’t affect photosynthesis in the oceans?
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10066832

and
http://www.esajournals.org/doi/abs/10.1890/13-0421.1
“Ecosystem-wide primary productivity generally increases with primary producer diversity, emphasizing the importance of diversity for ecosystem function….”
Nicole L. Goebel, Christopher A. Edwards, Michael J. Follows, and Jonathan P. Zehr 2014. Modeled diversity effects on microbial ecosystem functions of primary production, nutrient uptake, and remineralization. Ecology 153. http://dx.doi.org/10.1890/13-0421.1

So that’s great as long as the volume of water and ice are relatively constant, and it applies to ice sheets on water. But it doesn’t work if you add more ice from the land. And it ignores the fact that when you freeze water it stops flowing — that’s why sea levels drop during ice ages, the water is stuck at the poles. Conservation of mass still applies. There’s a relatively fixed mass of water in the oceans and ice combined. It has to go someplace. We haven’t even gotten to the effects of thermal expansion yet.

And, again, the thing people often forget and is not mentioned to any great extent here: If sea level goes up just a foot that can be disastrous. Remember that the sea does not go up. It goes across.

The “third theory” is correct (and wrt climate change applies to SEA ICE not GLACIERS). Fine. The problem here is that the water plus ice, with the water height buoyancy corrected (by itself), fills the glass But that is tap water that has been further chilled by ice. It is very cold, down near freezing, but above freezing. Room temperature is much warmer, and the temperature of a studio is perhaps even warmer. The water would have expanded and overflowed the glass.

This is why Mr. Wizard got rid of the kid … so he could wipe up the overflow and pretend like he was right!