When 715 million metric tons of carbon dioxide was coughed up into the atmosphere from the massive 2019-20 wildfires in Australia, scientists feared global warming had just been given a steroid shot.
New research, however, reminds us of just how cyclical everything on our Earth is, by demonstrating that algal blooms in the ocean, feasting in floating deposits of iron-rich ash which rained down from the sky as a result of the fires, have absorbed 80% of all the CO2 which was emitted.
Iron promotes the growth of microscopic marine life called phytoplankton, which use photosynthesis to produce energy just like plants.
One of these massive colonies, known as “blooms,” appeared off the coast of South Australia, and another, as wide as Australia itself, further out in the Pacific Ocean towards Chile, where they remained for about three months.
The data on their lifecycle was gathered through satellites and allowed Dr. Richard Matear and colleagues to compute how much CO2 they absorbed before disappearing.
A large portion of the 80% of the wildfires emissions taken in by the phytoplankton would have been deposited on the ocean floor.
“It shows a very nice connection between the land and the ocean and how the system tries to balance things out,” Matear told New Scientist.
Since they sit on the very bottom of the marine food web, the phytoplankton could have led to increases in the populations of other sea creatures, but that hasn’t been studied yet.
Because the scorched ground provides ideal conditions for future plant regrowth, most scientists will say a wildfire under normal conditions is carbon neutral, as the emissions are recaptured through the regrowing plants.
Image via Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communication Technology
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Australia is unique. It sits surrounded by millions of kilometres of ocean , and its climate cycle is floods, droughts and then fires. When the big rains come, the northern rivers flow inland refill Lake Eyre, and regenerate the Artesian Basin. The vegetative growth across the inland of Australia is lush, rich and nourishing. And then the drought comes and finally the fires. Without the efforts of stupid people, fires are also started by lightening. The Australian fauna and flora are adapted to these cycles.
Ash, silt and CO2 end up feeding the keystone species of ocean ecology and the phytoplankton returns the O2 to the atmosphere.
Almost sounds like it was planned.
Oil spills eaten by bacteria, iron and CO2 by phytoplankton… It’s almost like there are compensating mechanisms built into Earth’s ecosystems. Nah, what am I thinking? Cold or hot, it’s all CO2 and human’s fault,
They should have sent over all those Eco-Freaks to douse those fires in Australia and let them learn some real responsibility they wont learn from some Eco-Freak Group they have joined