Glaciers Contribute Significant Iron to North Atlantic Ocean
Glaciers Contribute Significant Iron to North Atlantic Ocean
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All living organisms rely on iron as an essential nutrient. In the ocean, iron’s abundance or scarcity means all the difference as it fuels the growth of plankton, the base of the ocean’s food web.
A new study led by biogeochemists and glaciologists at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), lead author PAOC and MIT-WHOI JP alumna Maya Bhatia (PhD '12), identifies a unexpectedly large source of iron to the North Atlantic – meltwater from glaciers and ice sheets, which may stimulate plankton growth during spring and summer. This source is likely to increase as melting of the Greenland ice sheet escalates under a warming climate.
The study Greenland meltwater as a significant and potentially bioavailable source of iron to the ocean was published online in Nature Geoscience on March 10, 2013.
“There’s only been one other study looking at the amount of iron that’s being released in meltwater runoff itself,” says Maya Bhatia, a graduate of the MIT/WHOI Joint Program in Oceanography and Applied Ocean Sciences and Engineering, and the study’s lead author, “and that had reported high nanomolar concentrations. So to find iron in concentrations several orders of magnitude higher – in the micromolar range – was very surprising.”
Maya Bhatia is currently a post-doctoral fellow studying environmental microbiology in the Hallam Lab of the Centre for Microbial Diversity and Evolution, at the University of Britich Columbia, Canada. Her Ph.D. advisors were WHOI's Sarah B. Das and Elizabeth Kujawinski.