News Release

This week from AGU: Saharan dust transport, moon missions, Pleistocene temperatures

Peer-Reviewed Publication

American Geophysical Union

From AGU's blogs: Saharan dust feeds Amazon rainforest just enough to replace lost nutrient

The Sahara Desert is a near-uninterrupted brown band of sand and scrub across the northern third of Africa. The Amazon rainforest is a dense green mass of humid jungle that covers northeast South America. But after strong winds sweep across the Sahara, a tan cloud rises in the air, stretches between the continents, and ties together the desert and the jungle. It's dust. And lots of it.

Scientists have not only used a satellite to measure the volume of dust that makes this trans-Atlantic journey. They have also calculated how much phosphorus - remnant in Saharan sands from part of the desert's past as a lake bed - gets carried across the ocean from one of the planet's most desolate places to one of its most fertile. A new paper accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union, provides the first satellite-based estimate of this phosphorus transport over multiple years. See a NASA video about the new research here.

From Eos.org: Human and Robotic Missions: To the Moon Again and Beyond

Robotic probes could help us collect samples from the Moon, potentially revealing the origins of our solar system.

From AGU's journals: What drove sea surface temperature change during the Pleistocene?

The last glacial period on Earth marks the end of the Pleistocene about 11,700 years ago. The warming temperatures in the Pleistocene are primarily attributed to increasing concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide that drove up tropical sea surface temperatures (SSTs) in the Pacific Ocean. However, new evidence indicates that a different mechanism may have helped temperatures to rise.

Dyez and Ravelo report the first measurements of SST changes over time within the western Pacific warm pool. Their results suggest that changes in the temperature of upwelled source water, in addition to atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, played a significant role in warming Pacific SST toward the end of the Pleistocene.

To assess past SSTs of both equatorial and off-equatorial regions of the western Pacific warm pool, the researchers analyzed microscopic shells found in the sediment record of the ocean floor. These shells are from planktonic forams, tiny creatures that lived in surface waters; their shells filtered down to the seabed upon their deaths. The ratio of magnesium to calcium within forams of different sediment layers gives an indication of SSTs when the foraminifera lived.

The researchers looked at forams from two different Ocean Drilling Program cores. The first site is located along the equatorial line within the western Pacific warm pool, while the second is at a latitude outside the pool, around 5 degrees north. Both cores span a time period of 0.04 to 1.41 million years ago.

If greenhouse gas concentrations were the only thing affecting SSTs at the time, SSTs calculated for both sites would be roughly the same. However, comparing the SST records from the sites revealed that SSTs in the western Pacific warm pool were higher than those calculated for the other site.

The authors show that heat from upwelled water in the warm pool affected its surface temperature in a significant and recordable way. Heat from this upwelling, in turn, may have influenced surrounding climate and helped to transform conditions from across the mid-Pleistocene transition, about 900,000 years ago, the authors posit.

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