Oxygen Generators at Risk From Dirty Air

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Much of the earth's oxygen supply is generated by tiny marine plants -- phytoplankton.  These plants are responsible for generating oxygen while at the same time, sopping up carbon dioxide from the air.

New concerns about the health of phytoplankton have been raised by marine researcher, Adina Paytan out of University of California, Santa Cruz.  Paytan exposed colonies of phytoplankton to air samples blown out to sea from various areas and recorded the results.  The expectation was that the air samples carrying tiny amounts of nitrogen, iron and phosphorus would act as fertilizers and encourage growth in the tiny plants. 

" Paytan incubated seawater phytoplankton in flasks filled with different samples of aerosol-rich air. "We wanted to find out how aerosol deposition impacts the phytoplankton community," Paytan explains. "Our hypothesis was that adding the aerosol will add nutrients to the incubation flasks and the phytoplankton will grow happily."

This is exactly what Paytan saw for aerosol samples being blown in from the Arabian Peninsula or Europe to the sampling point above a beach south of Eilat, Israel, at the Gulf of Aqaba, in the northern Red Sea. But when phytoplankton were exposed to samples of aerosols that had arrived from the Sahara Desert in Africa, some of them died. "We were very surprised," Paytan says. " Nature news

The researchers found that the samples coming from the Sahara Desert were high in copper.  Copper is a well known plant toxin.  The team's research showed that the tiny dust particles can not only help phytoplankton growth but also harm it.  The interaction of land and ocean is being shown to be far more complex than previously thought.

As more countries become industrialized and generate heavy metal particles into the air, we may see the oxygen generating ability of our oceans decrease.

See also:

Earth oxygen levels are dropping.  Plankton to save Humanity