{"id":344699,"date":"2024-09-26T14:05:10","date_gmt":"2024-09-26T12:05:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=344699"},"modified":"2024-09-26T14:05:13","modified_gmt":"2024-09-26T12:05:13","slug":"remember-that-lets-dump-iron-in-the-ocean-experiment-nature-is-actually-doing-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=344699","title":{"rendered":"Remember that \u2018let\u2019s dump iron in the ocean\u2019 experiment? Nature is actually doing it."},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From Watts Up With That?<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

By Anthony Watts<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

We have in the past made fun of ideas to fertilize the ocean with iron<\/a> dumped by ships to reduce carbon dioxide. The last experiment failed miserably<\/a>. Meanwhile nature says, \u201chold my beer.\u201d From Frontiers in Marine Science<\/em> and Florida State University comes this press release.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Oceanic life found to be thriving thanks to Saharan dust blown from thousands of kilometers away<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The further dust-bound iron is blown from the Sahara, the more it becomes available for life through atmospheric reactions<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Iron is a micronutrient indispensable for life, enabling processes such as respiration, photosynthesis, and DNA synthesis. Iron availability is often a limiting resource in today\u2019s oceans, which means that increasing the flow of iron into them can increase the amount of carbon fixed by phytoplankton, with consequences for the global climate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Iron ends up in oceans and terrestrial ecosystems through rivers, melting glaciers, hydrothermal activity, and especially wind. But not all its chemical forms are \u2018bioreactive\u2019, that is, available for organisms to take up from their environment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHere we show that iron bound to dust from the Sahara blown westward over the Atlantic has properties that change with the distance traveled: the greater this distance, the more bioreactive the iron,\u201d said Dr Jeremy Owens, an associate professor at Florida State University and a co-author on a new study in Frontiers in Marine Science<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThis relationship suggests that chemical processes in the atmosphere convert less bioreactive iron to more accessible forms.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The core of the matter<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Owens and colleagues measured the amounts of bioreactive and total iron in drill cores from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, collected by the International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) and its earlier versions. IODP aims to improve our understanding of changing climate and oceanic conditions, geological processes, and the origin of life. The researchers selected four cores, based on their distance from the so-called Sahara-Sahel Dust Corridor. The latter ranges from Mauritania to Chad and is known to be an important source of dust-bound iron for downwind areas.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"
Figure 1. Locations of IODP sites 658, 659, 1062 and 1063 with Fe data. Base map shows estimates for dust deposition (g m-2 y-1) \u2014 specifically transport of African dust across the surface ocean. Dust flux data are from Jickells et al. (2005), Mahowald et al. (1999), and Ginoux et al. (2001); all other data are from this study. Highly reactive Fe (FeHR) for each site is normalized to total Fe (FeT) to distinguish relative enrichments or deficiencies in the FeHR pool. Also shown are the Fe isotope compositions (\u03b456Fe) to constrain different sources of Fe.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

The two cores closest to this corridor were collected approximately 200km and 500km west of northwestern Mauritania, a third in the mid-Atlantic, and the fourth approximately 500km to the east of Florida. The authors studied the upper 60 to 200 meters of these cores, reflecting deposits over to the last 120,000 years \u2013 the time since the previous interglacial.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They measured the total iron concentrations along these cores, as well as concentrations of iron isotopes with a plasma-mass spectrometer. These isotope data were consistent with dust from the Sahara.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They then used a suite of chemical reactions to reveal the fractions of total iron present in the sediments in the form of iron carbonate, goethite, hematite, magnetite, and pyrite. The iron in these minerals, while not bioreactive, likely formed from more bioreactive forms through geochemical processes on the seafloor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cRather than focusing on the total iron content as previous studies had done, we measured iron that can dissolve easily in the ocean, and which can be accessed by marine organisms for their metabolic pathways,\u201d said Owens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOnly a fraction of total iron in sediment is bioavailable, but that fraction could change during transport of the iron away from its original source. We aimed to explore those relationships.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Blowing in the wind<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The results showed that the proportion of bioreactive iron was lower in the westernmost cores than in the easternmost ones. This implied that a correspondingly greater proportion of bioreactive iron had been lost from the dust and presumably been used by organisms in the water column, so that it had never reached the sediments at the bottom.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOur results suggest that during long-distance atmospheric transport, the mineral properties of originally non-bioreactive dust-bound iron change, making it more bioreactive. This iron then gets taken up by phytoplankton, before it can reach the bottom,\u201d said Dr Timothy Lyons, a professor at the University of California at Riverside and the study\u2019s final author.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe conclude that dust that reaches regions like the Amazonian basin and the Bahamas may contain iron that is particularly soluble and available to life, thanks to the great distance from North Africa, and thus a longer exposure to atmospheric chemical processes,\u201d said Lyons.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe transported iron seems to be stimulating biological processes much in the same way that iron fertilization can impact life in the oceans and on continents. This study is a proof of concept confirming that iron-bound dust can have a major impact on life at vast distances from its source.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We have in the past\u00a0made fun of ideas to fertilize the ocean with iron\u00a0dumped by ships to reduce carbon dioxide. The last experiment\u00a0failed miserably. Meanwhile nature says, \u201chold my beer.\u201d From\u00a0Frontiers in Marine Science\u00a0and Florida State University comes this press release.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":121246920,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","_crdt_document":"","advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[691827130,691830731,691830730,691830729,691818584],"class_list":["post-344699","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-carbon-dioxide-co2","tag-frontiers-in-marine-science","tag-iron","tag-ocean-fertilization","tag-sahara","has-post-thumbnail","fallback-thumbnail"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paxLW1-1rFF","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":266370,"url":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=266370","url_meta":{"origin":344699,"position":0},"title":"New research ponders consequences of ocean iron\u00a0fertilization","author":"uwe.roland.gross","date":"07\/09\/2023","format":false,"excerpt":"Any deliberate large-scale interference in natural processes must be fraught with risks and difficulties. 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