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Marine science

Storms bring ocean nutrients to light

Nature volume 525, pages 460–461 (2015)Cite this article

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Ships and ocean-observing robots have been used to quantify the amount of nutrients that a storm brings up from the Stygian ocean depths to the sunlit surface — a first step in assessing how storms affect oceanic biomass production.

Seawater absorbs most sunlight within 100 metres of the ocean's surface, where available inorganic nutrients are rapidly assimilated by photosynthesizing plankton. As these cells die or are excreted in a consumer's waste, they sink into the dark ocean interior, where microbial decay returns their nutrients to the dissolved inorganic form. The physical processes that lift the resulting nutrient-rich water from the dark interior to the sunlit upper ocean are responsible for sustaining nearly all marine life. Writing in Global Biogeochemical Cycles, Rumyantseva et al.1 quantify how a mid-latitude storm and its after-effects drive upward pulses of nutrients, thereby advancing our understanding of the processes that nourish plankton at the base of the marine food chain.

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Figure 1: Uplift of nutrients in the ocean during and after a storm.

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References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Jaime Palter is at the Graduate School of Oceanography, University of Rhode Island, Narragansett Bay Campus, Narragansett, Rhode Island 02882, USA.,

    Jaime Palter

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  1. Jaime Palter
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Correspondence to Jaime Palter.

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Palter, J. Storms bring ocean nutrients to light. Nature 525, 460–461 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/525460a

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