from the phytoplankton-always-up-for-a-phyte dept.
Black Summer bushfires triggered Southern Ocean algal blooms bigger than Australia:
As Black Summer bushfires devastated huge swathes of south-east Australia, they were seeding new life in the ocean, hundreds of kilometres away. Iron-rich ash and smoke dropped from the atmosphere and into the Southern Ocean, fuelling enormous blooms of algae between New Zealand and South America.
At their biggest, the blooms covered an area larger than Australia, according to a study published today in Nature.
Richard Matear, an oceans and climate scientist with the CSIRO and study co-author, says the work shows how events like bushfires can have profound effects on ecosystems much further afield. "This is kind of a nice example of how the terrestrial biosphere connects to the ocean in an interesting way," Dr Matear said. 'We can't necessarily always treat these things as separate."
Algal blooms materialise when single-celled organisms — algae, also called phytoplankton — rapidly multiply to form massive congregations. Algae may be microscopic, but their blooms can be seen from space. And blooms can be seasonal, such as the "spring bloom" that's currently kicking off along the coast of New South Wales, said Penny Ajani, a marine biologist who studies phytoplankton at University of Technology Sydney, and who was not involved with the study.
With more daylight, warmer temperatures and an influx of cold, nutrient-rich water, the bloom is visible from the coast. "When I walk along the beach, the ocean's looking a particularly green colour at the moment, and you can see a little green line along the shoreline," Dr Ajani said.
The NSW spring bloom is driven by the East Australian Current and dissipates after a couple of weeks, but algal blooms can also be triggered during their off-season by adding trace elements such as iron to seawater.
Iron is essential for photosynthetic organisms like algae to live and reproduce. It can be found in pollutants as well as natural sources such as volcanic ash, which can spawn huge algal blooms in the North Pacific, for instance.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 17 2021, @11:23AM (1 child)
Just harvest the algae and you have a replenishable supply of biofuel.
Burn more trees?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 17 2021, @11:47AM
Along similar lines, does this algae die and then sequester the carbon at the ocean bottom?
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 17 2021, @11:37AM
And why haven't the Woke crowd cancelled it yet?
(Score: 2) by corey on Friday September 17 2021, @11:45AM (5 children)
Wow, the size of Australia is finally used in a comparison. I can’t remember how many Texases fit in one Australia though, sorry American mates. (And we’re much better mates now, apparently).
I read about this today, seems like some slight good news in a global warming sense. A lot of bush burned that summer, a lot.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 17 2021, @12:51PM (3 children)
There used to be a cattle station in WA that was bigger than the state of Texas. I was really sad they broke it up into three stations. Can't remember its name, think it started with M.
Google and DDG are useless, only showing current stuff. Search for "largest station ever", you get pages of Anna Creek station, which is bullshit.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday September 17 2021, @02:30PM (2 children)
"Australia is about 11 times bigger than Texas." -- According to random DDG result.
The top 10 largest cattle stations according to wikipedia account for 57,880 square miles of land. Texas covers 261,232 square miles of land. Either they were broken up into much smaller pieces or you're not recalling it correctly. It could be either one, because there's plenty of land in Western Australia for it to have at least been possible as Western Australia covers 975,685 square miles of land.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 17 2021, @09:11PM (1 child)
Yeah, it occupied most of the top half, about one third of the state in total. I think quite a bit of it was given back to the Aborigines.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 19 2021, @01:45AM
Who've promptly done nothing productive with it. Great job guys.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday September 17 2021, @03:45PM
In Aus-TRIAL-ya, oy think they would sigh: sorry American mites.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday September 17 2021, @03:47PM (7 children)
We can forever continue to simultaneously use the oceans as both a pantry as well as toilet and garbage dump. Nothing bad will ever happen.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday September 17 2021, @04:03PM (6 children)
Uhhhmmmm, yeah. But, precious little enters or leaves the biosphere, in the short term or the long term. Every drop of water you have ever drank has been pissed away millions of times by something before you got it.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday September 17 2021, @04:33PM (4 children)
That is true. The biosphere naturally recycles things.
However we are doing unnatural things to it, including the oceans. Things that weren't part of the stable biosphere for hundreds of millions of years.
Left alone, how long will the great garbage ring persist in the oceans.
How long will there be radioactive atoms from Fukushima, and how far will it disperse.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday September 17 2021, @04:47PM
Good questions.
I suspect that the 'dead zones' that we've known about for decades would recover pretty quickly, if we just stopped dumping sewerage into them. Less than 20 years, is my guess, because there is still a lot of life in the oceans to pick over all the resources. They'll get oxygenated, living things will hover around the fringes, then start moving into the formerly dead zones.
That plastic patch in the Pacific (and likely others that aren't publicized yet) will be around for a long time. At least it isn't inherently deadly to all life. It would be nice if we used the military to pick plastic out of the water. They certainly have the manpower to take on such a task. Get all our allies and partners involved - Japan, the Philipines, 'Straya, everybody. Maybe shame China and Russia into contributing.
Radioactive waste? Ain't a damned thing we can do about it now, but I don't suppose it's going to be all that bad for life in the ocean. Ultimately, it's going to disperse all around the world. You may get a few localized mutations and crap in the shorter term, but overall, it's really not that much radiation. A couple persistent hot spots somewhere that the water doesn't really circulate a lot, maybe. But, there won't be any Chernobyl-level hot spots. Humanity and nature dodged a bullet there.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday September 17 2021, @06:23PM (2 children)
You don't need to worry about radioactivity from Fukushima. The highly radioactive stuff is already several half-lives along the way. The lower level stuff really is easily dispersable into the background.
Plastics, though, are more dubious. Also lots of chemical enzyme mimics, that are just different enough to not be biodegradable. Any one of them is probably harmless as the present concentration, but a mix of several of them may well not be. Some life will adapt, but most likely are those with lots of instances and rapid reproduction. Say bacteria. As you get fewer and slower, the chance of a wipeout becomes larger. Humans are pretty big, not very numberous (compared even to mice), and reproduce slowly. Also we're top predators, which means that the stuff gets concentrated as it becomes food for us.
FWIW, there are other explanations for why the population growth has slowed, but in my, non-expert, opinion, we can't rule out pollution as a component. And we could just be seeing the tip of the iceberg...we don't know.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by PinkyGigglebrain on Friday September 17 2021, @10:35PM (1 child)
Also the Japanese arent' just pumping the water out of the holding tanks into the ocean. The water is being treated and filtered to get the really dangerous stuff out of it first. The only thing they can't filter out effectively is the Tritium in the water, since it IS the water. It also has a half life of 12 years and is a beta emitter, which means that A; about a quarter of it will have already decayed away by the time they actually start pumping the water out, and B; the radiation from Tritium can be stopped my by the average sheet of paper.
add to that its going to be released almost a half mile under the sea's surface where it will dilute to the point that the radiation from it will be lost in the natural background levels. Personally I'm not going to lose any sleep over it or freak out about eating fresh sashimi caught in that area.
And you might also find this article about environmental estrogen [nutritionreview.org] an interesting read.
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday September 18 2021, @12:40AM
Estrogen mimics are just one class of chemical pollutants that affect the endocrine system, and the tests usually only consider the pollutants one-by-one rather than in combination. (That one about the PCB contaminated fish seems like an exception.)
So I think the effects are more widespread than a simple comparison involving estrogen mimics would reveal. (But it's still a good link, as a sort of "at least this much effect" kind of piece.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by PinkyGigglebrain on Friday September 17 2021, @10:54PM
after being vapor distilled into pure H2O by natural evaporation.
And its not just the water.
When you get right down to it just about anything and everything you consume has at some point been shit or pissed out of something else.
The worm tailings (aka shit) in the potting mix your using to grow your fresh organic tomatoes. or the bullshit that fertilized the grass in the pasture where that cow lived before ending up next to the potatoes on your diner plate.
[music]
It's the Circle of life!!
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"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."