By Environment
Correspondent Alister Doyle
OSLO, March 10 (Reuters) - A melt of
Greenland's ice is washing large amounts of the nutrient iron into the Atlantic
Ocean where it might aid marine life in a rare positive side-effect of climate
change, a study showed on Sunday.
Greenland's thaw, which is raising
world sea levels, is also adding about 300,000 tonnes of iron a year to the
North Atlantic, based on projections from the muddy melt water of three glaciers
in the southwest, it said.
That is similar to the amount of iron blown
to the region in dust by winds. Scientists say that iron is a vital nutrient and
that a lack of the element in parts of the oceans limits growth of everything
from tiny plankton to fish and whales.
"We suggest that glacial runoff
serves as a signicant source of bio-available iron to surrounding coastal
oceans," the scientists, mainly at the U.S. Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
(WHOI), wrote in the journal Nature Geoscience.
"We would expect this
glacial contribution of iron to the North Atlantic Ocean to continue to increase
under future warming scenarios," they added.
The findings show that "as
glaciers and ice sheets melt there may be other effects than just increased sea
level," said Maya Bhatia, who was leader of the study at WHOI and the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
ARCTIC, ANTARCTICA
Scientists only started to examine the chemistry of glacial runoff in the past
decade and nutrients carried into seas from the Arctic to Antarctica, she told
Reuters.
"We believe that our study adds iron to that list of glacially
derived nutrients," she said. Phytoplankton, or tiny marine plants, also need
nutrients such as nitrates or phosphates to grow.
The scientists found
large amounts or iron in waters flowing from under the three Greenland glaciers.
They did not measure how much iron reached the open ocean or study if it was
boosting growth of marine life.
Some past studies have shown blooms of
microscopic algae coinciding with peak runoff from the Greenland ice sheet in
summer.
Separately, some experts have proposed dumping iron into the
oceans, mainly the Southern Ocean where it is in short supply, to combat
climate change that a U.N. panel of scientists blames for causing floods,
droughts and rising sea levels.
The idea is that iron will cause new
blooms of algae that absorb the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide from the air. Some
of the carbon would then fall to the seabed when the algae die, removing it from
the atmosphere.
Bhatia said it was not yet known if iron from Greenland
could be a side-effect of warming that would cause algal blooms and offset
climate change.
The U.N. panel of climate scientists has estimated that
world sea levels will rise by between 18 and 59 cms (7-23 inches) this century,
more if a thaw of Greenland and Antarctica accelerates.
Sea levels have
been rising at about 3 mm a year in recent years and Greenland has been
contributing. Rising seas are a big threat to low-lying areas from Miami to
Bangladesh.
(Reporting By Alister Doyle; Editing by Stephen Powell)
© 2011 Reuters
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