BATON ROUGE — LSU’s Sibel Bargu, along with her former graduate student Ana Garcia, from the Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences in LSU’s School of the Coast & Environment, has discovered toxic algae in vast, remote regions of the o…
SANTA CRUZ, CA–A team of marine scientists has found that toxin-producing algae once thought to be limited to coastal waters are also common in the open ocean, where the addition of iron from natural or artificial sources can stimulate rapid growth…
Reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas linked to global warming, by fertilizing the oceans with iron may not be as attractive a solution as once thought according to a report in Science magazine.
In their observations released on April 4, Ken Buesseler of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Philip Boyd of the University of Otago in New Zealand report that iron fertilization as a means to “lock up” carbon in the oceans should be explored but note that the most basic question of “Will it work?” needs to be addressed before such a strategy is undertaken on a commercial scale.
The ecological importance of phytoplankton, microscopic plants that free-float through the world’s oceans, is well known. Among their key roles, the one-celled organisms are the major source of sustenance for animal life in the seas. Now, researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego say that phytoplankton exert a significant and previously uncalculated influence on Earth’s climate.