Indian Ocean phytoplankton in danger

摘要

A rapid loss of phytoplankton threatens to turn the western Indian Ocean into an "ecological desert," a new study warns. The research reveals that phytoplankton populations in the region fell an alarming 30 percent over the last 16 years. A decline in ocean mixing due to warming surface waters is to blame, researchers propose online January 19 in Geophysical Research Letters. The mixing ferries nutrients from the ocean's dark depths up into the sunlit layers that the phytoplankton inhabit. The loss of these photosynthesizers, which form the foundation of the ocean food web, may undermine the region's ecosystem, says study coauthor Raghu Murtugudde, an oceanographer at the University of Maryland in College Park.