Black Summer Bushfires Triggered Southern Ocean Algal Blooms Bigger Than Australia

upstart writes:

Black Summer bushfires triggered Southern Ocean algal blooms bigger than Australia:

As Black Summer bushfires devastated huge swathes of south-east Australia, they were seeding new life in the ocean, hundreds of kilometres away. Iron-rich ash and smoke dropped from the atmosphere and into the Southern Ocean, fuelling enormous blooms of algae between New Zealand and South America.

At their biggest, the blooms covered an area larger than Australia, according to a study published today in Nature.

Richard Matear, an oceans and climate scientist with the CSIRO and study co-author, says the work shows how events like bushfires can have profound effects on ecosystems much further afield. "This is kind of a nice example of how the terrestrial biosphere connects to the ocean in an interesting way," Dr Matear said. 'We can't necessarily always treat these things as separate."

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