Asian Dust Storm Causes Plankton To Bloom In The North Pacific; Robotic Carbon Explorers Test The "Iron Hypothesis" In Nature

A group of scientists led by oceanographer James K. Bishop of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Earth Sciences Division engineered the deep-diving Carbon Explorers to measure particulate carbon in the upper thousand meters of the ocean. The Carbon Explorers are modified SOLO floats (Sounding Oceanographic Lagrangian Observers), originally designed by Russ Davis of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography to measure temperature and salinity at various depths. A growing number of SOLOs are now adrift in ocean currents around the world, as part of the international Project Argo to study ocean climate variability.

Two of the specially modified Carbon Explorers were launched April 10, 2001, from the U.S. Coast Guard's icebreaker Polar Star near Ocean Station PAPA, in subarctic waters a thousand miles west of Vancouver Island. The Carbon Observers were programmed to sample the depths and return to the surface three times every two days, regularly sending data to satellites overhead. The two floats, controlled from shore, returned a virtually unbroken stream of information for the next eight months, through December, 2001.

Ocean Station PAPA, at 50 degrees north latitude, 145 degrees west longitude, is one of the few sites in the world whose waters have been studied for decades using shipboard instruments. PAPA thus provides an excellent baseline for observing variations in the carbon products of photosynthesis at different depths.

"The plants that fix carbon in the ocean typically live, reproduce, and die on day-to-week time scales," Bishop says. "The beauty of the Carbon Observers is that they keep on working day in and day out, for seasons at a time, matching the biological rhythms of the sea in a way that ships and other systems cannot."

Phytoplankton growth is affected by factors like nutrient concentrations, light, temperature, salinity, and the way the sea water mixes. Earlier studies at PAPA suggested that growth in the region was also limited by a lack of dissolved iron in the water. The Carbon Observers would soon put that assumption to the test.

In the 1930s oceanographers first began to suspect that terrestrial dust storms play a key role in phytoplankton growth in the so-called high nutrient, low chlorophyl (HNLC) areas of the ocean, whose concentrations of dissolved iron, an essential micronutrient, are much lower than in other regions. By dissolving carbon in seawater and by fixing it as biomass or inorganic particulate matter, phytoplankton regulates carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and thus helps regulate global climate.

In the 1980s, oceanographer John Martin gathered these facts in his "iron hypothesis," which proposed that by fertilizing plankton growth with iron, global warming could be offset. Iron fertilization can indeed cause plankton "blooms" in HNLC waters, as several expeditions including Soiree (the Southern Ocean Iron Enrichment Experiment) in February 1999 and SOFeX (the Southern Ocean Iron [Fe] Experiment) in January and February 2002 have proved by pouring dissolved iron into HNLC areas in the Southern Hemisphere. But prior to the spring of 2001, fertilization by iron transported in terrestrial dust storms had never been observed directly.

Three days before the launch of the Carbon Observers on April 10, a NASA satellite recorded a large dust storm originating near the Gobi Desert in China and Mongolia; on the day of the launch, the dust cloud was over Japan and heading for the North Pacific. It reached Ocean Station PAPA on April 12, where it kicked up the waves and deposited a large amount of dust.

Although high waves temporarily kept the Carbon Observers from reporting by satellite, data collection continued uninterrupted through the storm. Five days after the storm passed, the floats reported rising concentrations of particulate organic carbon; the concentration almost double