As it happens, SPONCH is an acronym for the six elements most essential to living organisms — sulfur, phosphorus, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, and hydrogen — which is ironic, because ¡Sponch! is totally devoid of any substance that might benefit the living organism that consumes it.

The Chomp app makes it easy to check if food is vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free, or if it has ingredients you avoid….Sponch, Marshmallow Cookies.

500 million years ago

Why is carbon so basic to life? The reason is carbon’s ability to form stable bonds with many elements, including itself. This property allows carbon to form a huge variety of very large and complex molecules. In fact, there are nearly 10 million carbon-based compounds in living things!

Because of its ability to form these bonds, carbon can create very large and complex molecules called macromolecules that make up living organisms. This is part of why this versatile element is considered the backbone, or basic structural component, of these molecules.

“When fossil fuels are no longer available—especially if it happens abruptly, which it potentially will—we’re going to see patients dying in hospitals and healthcare facilities due to electricity failure, and this will be particularly acute during natural disasters.”

Where the carbon is located — in the atmosphere or on Earth — is constantly in flux. On Earth, most carbon is stored in rocks and sediments, while the rest is located in the ocean, atmosphere, and in living organisms. These are the reservoirs, or sinks, through which carbon cycles.

So where then did all the carbon that living organisms are built of come from? It turns out that most of the carbon we use today came from a collision with another smallish planet about 4.4 billion years ago.

Not all dead organisms are acted on by decomposers. Instead of being immediately recycled, the carbon from some organisms is kept in a type of long-term storage, or carbon sink. How do humans use the materials in the carbon sink? We burn them as energy sources.

The ocean, atmosphere, soil and forests are the world’s largest carbon sinks. Protecting these vital ecosystems is essential for tackling climate change and keeping our climate stable. But they’re increasingly under threat. The world’s forests absorb 2.6bn tonnes of carbon dioxide every year.

Oceans act as a heat sink, as they react slower and with less a temperature change than land masses do. The temperature distribution of the waters on Earth is efficiently monitored from space by remote sensing Earth observation satellites.

Ocean plants take in the carbon dioxide and give off oxygen, just like land plants. The ocean is great at sucking up CO2 from the air. It absorbs about one-quarter of the CO2 that we humans create when we burn fossil fuels (oil, coal, and natural gas.)

Oceans act as a ‘heat sink’: No global warming ‘hiatus’ New research points to the prominent role global ocean played in absorbing extra heat from the atmosphere by acting as a “heat sink” as an explanation for the observed decrease in a key indicator of climate change.