The waters of the Southern Ocean have proven cold and unforgiving to us humans for centuries, yet certain areas are teeming with life. Phytoplankton are the base of the marine food web, providing nutrients to countless species immediately or up the chain.
These microalgae also feed on iron, yet the Southern Ocean is so huge that iron can become very scarce the farther out you travel. “Iron mostly comes from dust inputs from the wind,” explains Dr. Casey Schine at Middlebury College, “picking up dust on the continents and depositing it in the ocean.” Dr. Schine says global dust patterns aren’t enough to account for some massive blooms that thrive in the large expanse of the Southern Hemisphere seas.
A previous paper put forth that hydrothermal vents in the ocean floor promoted the blooms in this region instead. Dr. Schine and crew took it a step further, and found a whole lotta shaking going on: “This paper is saying that we can actually predict that changes in surface phytoplankton are related to earthquakes… so based on recent earthquake activity, we can predict changes in surface production.”
Dr. Schine says, like a lot of us, she and a colleague got bored during the initial COVID years. Some people did sourdough starters… they took a different tack.
While we can measure changes in hydrothermalism, these vents were only discovered in 2015, and wouldn’t have a long record even if we did get good instruments on them immediately.
The earthquakes provided an extra piece to the puzzle, “supercharging” those blooms by releasing plenty of iron and other nutrients locked in Earth’s crust: “There’s a bit of a cause-and-effect, chicken-and-egg thing, whether the earthquakes cause the changes in hydrothermalism, or the changes in sort of the fluid associated with hydrothermalism causes the slip that creates the earthquake… but the association was undeniable.”
There are many well-established plankton blooms in this part of the world — mostly on continental shelves — but this one lies halfway between New Zealand and Antarctica, about as “in the middle of nowhere” as you can get on Earth.
Dr. Schine says there are slow seeps and larger eruptive events, but it’s tough to pin down what kind is feeding this particular bloom, roughly the size of the earthquake capital of the country, California: “This is an extremely remote part of the ocean, and an extremely rough part of the ocean… so studying them is quite difficult.”
Extending the earthquake catalogue here is a solid next step, with most below a magnitude 5 largely missed. Dr. Schine offers that “the planet is getting more instrumented every day, so hopefully these things will kind of start to fill in the gaps and give us more data in places where we are quite data poor.”
These studies are critical for understanding how larger marine life like whales can survive such harsh conditions, using these blooms as “rest stops” of sorts before moving on: “Early in the season, it’s just like a wall of sea ice between them and those very productive feeding grounds. It is incredibly important, these blooms, these sort of concentrations of productivity before you get to the sea ice, because then they have to go under the sea ice and they’re not going to encounter food for a long time.”
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