Latest Phytoplankton Stories

The icy seas between Australia and Antarctica could become a money generator by engineering nature to soak up carbon dioxide and then selling carbon credits worth millions of dollars.But many scientists believe the concept of using nature to mop up mankind's excess CO2 to fight global warming is fraught with risk and uncertainty.An Australian research body suggests more research is needed before commercial ventures are allowed to fertilize oceans on a large scale and over many years to...

Researchers say they are now using satellite monitoring of marine environments for predicting cholera outbreaks.Cholera outbreaks follow seasonal increases in sea temperature, scientists said, and this could provide an early warning system for India and Bangladesh where cholera epidemics occur regularly.Tiny animals, which increase in number with sea temperature rise, bring the cholera pathogen into the drinking water supply.The satellites were able to pick up sea temperature changes in the...

Diatoms, mighty microscopic algae, have profound influence on climate, producing 20 percent of the oxygen we breathe by capturing atmospheric carbon and in so doing, countering the greenhouse effect. Since their evolutionary origins these photosynthetic wonders have come to acquire advantageous genes from bacterial, animal and plant ancestors enabling them to thrive in today's oceans. These findings, based on the analysis of the latest sequenced diatom genome, Phaeodactylum tricornutum, are...

A team of scientists is studying the complex ocean upwelling process by mimicking nature "“ pumping cold, nutrient-rich water from deep within the Pacific Ocean and releasing it into surface waters near Hawaii that lack the nitrogen and phosphorous necessary to support high biological production.The researchers are harnessing the power of the ocean to conduct their experiments, using the up-and-down motion of waves to pump deep water to the surface. Their next step is to create a pump that...

By Anonymous The brilliant beamlines of the Australian Synchrotron are finding a host of environmental applications, from studying the chemistry of the upper atmosphere to developing better catalysts for hydrogen production. Detecting and precisely locating specific atoms and molecules is one of the things synchrotrons do best. That makes them very useful for many environmental applications. The Australian Synchrotron's microspectroscopy beamline, for instance, can be used as a probe to map...

By Lapointe, Mathieu MacKenzie, Tyler D B; Morse, David The oceans globally constitute an important sink for carbon dioxide (CO2) due to phytoplankton photosynthesis. However, the marine environment imposes serious restraints to carbon fixation. First, the equilibrium between CO2 and bicarbonate (HCO^sub 3^-) is pH dependent, and, in normal, slightly alkaline seawater, [CO2] is typically low (approximately 10 mM ). Second, the rate of CO2 diffusion in seawater is slow, so, for any cells...

A seasonal bloom of ocean plankton is pulling more carbon dioxide than previously thought from the atmosphere into the Atlantic Ocean, U.S. researchers said. The bloom -- nurtured by the Amazon River -- may be enough to turn the tropical Atlantic from a net source of atmospheric carbon into a net carbon sink that removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, New Scientist reported. Ajit Subramaniam, an oceanographer at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y., and his colleagues...

It's summertime and people are flocking to the coasts around the country. But when summer storms arrive, it's not only beach-goers who are affected; the rains can also have an impact on living creatures far below the ocean surface. Summer storms sweep fertilizers into the rivers and streams and carry them to the shoreline. Once the plumes of storm and river runoff reach the coast, the nutrients in fertilizers can feed tiny ocean plants, called phytoplankton, which can bloom and create...

An international team of scientists surveying the waters of the continental shelf off the West Coast of North America has discovered for the first time high levels of acidified ocean water within 20 miles of the shoreline, raising concern for marine ecosystems from Canada to Mexico.Researchers aboard the Wecoma, an Oregon State University research vessel, also discovered that this corrosive, acidified water that is being "upwelled" seasonally from the deeper ocean is probably 50 years old,...

Is the Dust-Storm Theory Overblown? Most oceanographers have assumed that, in the areas of the world's oceans known as High Nutrient, Low Chlorophyll (HNLC) regions, the iron needed to fertilize infrequent plankton blooms comes almost entirely from wind-blown dust. Phoebe Lam and James Bishop of the Earth Sciences Division at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have now shown that in the North Pacific, at least, it just isn't so. In a forthcoming issue of...