Posted on behalf of Katharine Sanderson

Aerosols were thought to fertilise the oceans, providing phytoplankton with lots of yummy nutrients – nitrogen, phosphorous and iron.

But research published yesterday in PNAS offers a reminder that atmospheric and biogeochemical systems are never that simple. It seems that certain aerosols, those rich in copper, can be toxic to some species of phytoplankton. Read the Nature News story here. The paper, by UCSC marine scientist Adina Paytan and colleagues, is online here.

There are a number of messages to take from this research. First, positive and negative effects of aerosols need to be looked at together, and more closely. Second, different phytoplankton respond differently to different aerosol contents. Third, these processes need to be much better understood in the face of rising aerosol emissions from rapidly industrialising nations like China and India. Fourth, things out there are way more complicated than we thought.

Katharine Sanderson

Image: Phytoplankton swirls in the Arabian Sea / NASA Earth Observatory, via Wikimedia