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Ocean currents push phytoplankton around the globe faster than thought
![The Great Ocean Conveyor Belt - blue = deep cold and saltier water current, red = shallower and warmer current [credit: NWS / NOAA]](/r2/?url=http://tallbloke.wordpress.com//feed/https://tallbloke.files.wordpress.com/2016/04/oceancirc.jpg)
The Great Ocean Conveyor Belt – blue = deep cold and saltier water current, red = shallower and warmer current
[credit: NWS / NOAA]
Evidence here from researchers of shorter oceanic cycles than expected. They say ‘The general message is that all parts of the ocean surface are connected on surprisingly short time scales’, which could be ‘just 10 years’.
The billions of single-celled marine organisms known as phytoplankton can drift from one region of the world’s oceans to almost any other place on the globe in less than a decade, Princeton University researchers have found.
Unfortunately, the same principle can apply to plastic debris, radioactive particles and virtually any other man-made flotsam and jetsam that litter our seas, the researchers found. Pollution can thus become a problem far from where it originated within just a few years.
The finding that objects can move around the globe in just 10 years suggests that ocean biodiversity may be more resilient to climate change than previously thought, according to a study published this week in the journal Nature Communications. Phytoplankton form the basis of the marine food chain, and their rapid spread could enable them to quickly repopulate areas where warming seas or ocean acidification have decimated them.
“Our study shows that the ocean is quite efficient in moving things around,” said Bror Fredrik Jönsson, an associate research scholar in Princeton’s Department of Geosciences, who conducted the study with co-author James R. Watson, a former Princeton postdoctoral researcher who is now a researcher at Stockholm University. “This comes as a surprise to a lot of people, and in fact we spent about two years confirming this work to make sure we got it right,” Jönsson said.
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The researchers confirmed that the travel times calculated by their model were similar to the time it took real objects accidentally dumped into the ocean to be carried by currents. For instance, 29,000 rubber ducks and other plastic bath toys toppled off a Chinese freighter in 1992 and have since been tracked as a method of understanding ocean currents.
A similar utility has stemmed from the “Great Shoe Spill of 1990” when more than 60,000 Nike athletic shoes plunged into the ocean near Alaska and have been riding the currents off the Pacific Northwest ever since.
The researchers’ model also matched the amount of time it took radioactive particles to reach the West Coast of the United States from Japan’s Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant, which released large amounts of radioactive materials into the Pacific Ocean following heavy damage from a tsunami in March 2011. The actual travel time of the materials was 3.6 years; the model calculated it would take 3.5 years.
Full phys.org report: Ocean currents push phytoplankton—and pollution—around the globe faster than thought
Source: https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2016/04/20/ocean-currents-push-phytoplankton-around-the-globe-faster-than-thought/
