An exceptional phytoplankton bloom in the southeast Madagascar Sea driven by African dust deposition

Gittings, John A; Dall’Olmo, Giorgio; Tang, Weiyi; Llort, Joan; Jebri, Fatma ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7048-0068; Livanou, Eleni; Nencioli, Francesco; Darmaraki, Sofia; Theodorou, Iason; Brewin, Robert J W; Srokosz, Meric ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7347-7411; Cassar, Nicolas; Raitsos, Dionysios E; Palumbi, Stephen. 2024 An exceptional phytoplankton bloom in the southeast Madagascar Sea driven by African dust deposition. PNAS Nexus, 3 (10). https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgae386

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Text © The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of National Academy of Sciences. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. pgae386.pdf - Published Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Download (1MB) | Preview

Abstract/Summary

Rising surface temperatures are projected to cause more frequent and intense droughts in the world's drylands. This can lead to land degradation, mobilization of soil particles, and an increase in dust aerosol emissions from arid and semi-arid regions. Dust aerosols are a key source of bio-essential nutrients, can be transported in the atmosphere over large distances, and ultimately deposited onto the ocean's surface, alleviating nutrient limitation and increasing oceanic primary productivity. Currently, the linkages between desertification, dust emissions and ocean fertilization remain poorly understood. Here, we show that dust emitted from Southern Africa was transported and deposited into the nutrient-limited surface waters southeast of Madagascar, which stimulated the strongest phytoplankton bloom of the last two decades during a period of the year when blooms are not expected. The conditions required for triggering blooms of this magnitude are anomalous, but current trends in air temperatures, aridity, and dust emissions in Southern Africa suggest that such events could become more probable in the future. Together with the recent findings on ocean fertilization by drought-induced megafires in Australia, our results point toward a potential link between global warming, drought, aerosol emissions, and ocean blooms.

Item Type:	Publication - Article
Digital Object Identifier (DOI):	https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgae386
ISSN:	2752-6542
Date made live:	07 Oct 2024 15:55 +0 (UTC)
URI:	https://nora.nerc.ac.uk/id/eprint/538184

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