credit: image captured by Himawari-8 satellite – Japanese Meteorological Agency CC BY-SA 4.0
It would be nice to think that some clouds do have a silver lining – especially when confronted with the cascading effects of Australia’s devastating Black Summer Fires.
Iron-rich ash and smoke that was dropped into the Southern Ocean fuelled enormous blooms of phytoplankton.
The blooms covered an area larger than Australia!
These blooms were so vast that they almost offset carbon emitted by the fires.
Whether there were any long lasting effects from bushfire fuelled phytoplankton on the climate or ecosystem is still unclear!
Phytoplankton lie at the base of the oceanic food chain so the blooms will enhance sea life but could this enormous and unprecedented algae bloom have profound implications for CO2 levels in the atmosphere as well as for the marine ecosystem?
More research is needed to discover the fate of phytoplankton but whatever the reason it is clear it is only the beginning of new exciting lines of research that link forests, wildfires and phytoplankton growth and Earth’s climate.
Words – Lynnette Smith
Read more about it here!
Tang, W., Llort, J., Weis, J. et al. Widespread phytoplankton blooms triggered by 2019–2020 Australian wildfires. Nature 597, 370–375 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03805-8
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03805-8
To learn more about phytoplankton and their relationship with climate change, here’s a great starter !
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-319-93284-2_5
So how does climate change affect the ocean? Take a deep dive while also checking out the surface!
Phytoplankton are some of the smallest marine organisms. Still, they are one of the most important players in the marine environment. They are the basis of many marine food webs and, at the same time, sequester as much carbon dioxide as all terrestrial plants together. As such, they are important players when it comes to ocean climate change.
Käse L., Geuer J.K. (2018) Phytoplankton Responses to Marine Climate Change – An Introduction. In: Jungblut S., Liebich V., Bode M. (eds) YOUMARES 8 – Oceans Across Boundaries: Learning from each other. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93284-2_5
WOOEE _ 2022
