New York University Abu Dhabi, in a new study, revealed the importance of desert dust in maintaining the marine ecosystem on the surface of the Arabian Sea, where desert dust has a positive effect on phytoplankton, which forms the basis of the ocean food chain and plays an important role in the carbon cycle on the surface of the Arabian Sea. Earth and the overall health of the ocean ecosystem, by helping marine organisms survive and reproduce.
Nutrients carried by atmospheric dust from the desert region around the Arabian Sea, such as iron, play a key role in maintaining high levels of marine productivity, especially during the summer wind season.
Since the surface waters of the Arabian Sea contain low concentrations of iron, iron carried with atmospheric dust is essential to help phytoplankton to take advantage of key nutrients.
"In this region we face frequent dust storms," said Cecil Gio, a visiting researcher at New York University's Center for Climate Modeling. "Dust in people's minds is usually accompanied by dust-covered cars or low visibility."
She explained that these small molecules actually contain nutrients, which have a positive effect in plant-like microorganisms, which are phytoplankton that live in the ocean. These molecules are of great importance to humans and to the ocean itself, because they play a key role in removing carbon dioxide from the air and form the basis of the marine food chain.
Zuhair al-Ashqar, senior researcher at the New York University Abu Dhabi Center for Climate Modeling, said climate change is expected to affect the region's dryness and surface wind levels, which could carry significant future changes in the dust intensity of the Arabian Sea, thus causing potentially deep disruption. Of the marine ecosystem.
Al-Ashqar added that phytoplankton in the surface layer of the sea depends on important sources of nutrients for survival, development and reproduction, where they get nutrients mainly from the rich water coming from below the surface layer of the ocean, which is found along the coast of the Arabian Peninsula, while relying on dust Desert accumulated above the surface layer of the ocean as a second source of food.
In addition to deep water rich in nutrients in the Arabian Sea, dust deposition is just as important to the survival of phytoplankton in the sea, the study said, and confirms that these organisms would have been reduced by half, had it not been for iron absorbed by atmospheric dust.