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Phytoplankton bloom (light blue) as seen in the Southern Ocean through a break in the clouds.
OCE A N SCIENCE
BY PAUL FALKOWSKI giant marlins. Porpoises play. The ocean’s our atmosphere. Their fossilized remains,
bounty of animal life has long provided people buried and compressed by geological forces,
T
he ocean is teeming with organisms so with food, adventure and a sense of awe and are transformed into oil, the dense liquid of
small you can’t see them, populations wonder. But none of it would be possible with- carbon that we use to fuel our cars, trucks and
of microorganisms called phytoplank- out the single-celled organisms called phyto- buses. In addition, according to research that
ton. Tiny they may be, but over recent decades plankton that float by the thousands in every has only recently come into focus, they play a
these microscopic plant-like organisms have drop of water in the top 100 metres of the sea. huge role in the cycling of carbon dioxide from
been shown to help drive the global carbon Phytoplankton comprise two main groups: the atmosphere to the biosphere and back, and
cycle. Further research by marine biologists is photosynthetic cyanobacteria and the single- this cycling helps to control Earth’s climate.
steadily revealing the important role of micro- celled algae that drift in the sunlit top layers
organisms and their genes, and raising new of oceans. They provide A CERTAIN RATIO
questions about how they evolved. Can we use NATURE.COM food, directly or indi- Early clues to the global importance of phyto-
this knowledge to help us restore balanced car- For some of the rectly, for virtually every plankton emerged in the 1930s. Over several
bon cycling? latest research on other marine creature. research voyages, oceanographers had collected
Colourful tropical fish flit among sea anemo- phytoplankton: They emit much of the thousands of samples of sea water from the deep
nes in a coral reef. Anglers pose on deck with go.nature.com/smknvr oxygen that permeates ocean (below a depth of 500 metres) around the
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OUTLOOK LENSES ON BIOLOGY
world. They then measured the relative amounts iron, sulphur and phosphorus. that if the numbers were correct, the average
of carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus — elements Phytoplankton provide organic matter for phytoplankton in the ocean would take between
needed to construct essential cellular molecules the organisms that comprise the vast major- 16 and 20 days to divide, but that didn’t make
— in both phytoplankton and the sea water. ity of marine life. They do this by consuming sense to the biological oceanographers who
Alfred Redfield of Harvard University in Mas- carbon dioxide that would otherwise dissolve were familiar with these organisms. The phyto-
sachusetts realized that the proportions of these in the sea water and make it more acidic. The plankton should have been growing much faster.
elements in the ocean were not haphazard. In organisms provide organic matter for the vast Something was clearly wrong, but what?
every region of the ocean sampled, the ratio of majority of the marine food chain. Removing
nitrogen atoms to phosphorus atoms in the deep carbon dioxide from water also allows more of THE VIEW FROM SPACE
ocean was 16 to 1 — the same ratio as in the phy- it to diffuse in from the air, lowering atmos- In the late 1980s, chemist John Martin at the
toplankton. Were the phytoplankton mirroring pheric levels of the gas. In these ways, phyto- Moss Landing Marine Laboratory in California
the ocean? Or were these tiny organisms deter- plankton are crucial to the global carbon cycle, realized that the discrepancy occurred because
mining the chemistry of the vast waters? the circular path by which carbon atoms travel of contamination. Most of the seawater samples
For more than 20 years, Redfield and others from the atmosphere to the biosphere, to the taken over the previous three decades had been
puzzled over why these ratios were identical. land and then back to the ocean. inadvertently contaminated by heavy metals
He eventually made a crucial conceptual leap, from the black rubber O-rings used to seal the
proposing in 1958 that phytoplankton not only CARBON CONFUSION sampling devices. Rubber products are chemi-
reflected the chemical How do we know how individual elements such cally treated during manufacture to give them
“Phytoplankton composition of the as carbon move through our vast oceans and the correct mechanical properties. This process,
deep ocean, but cre- the atmosphere? The first clues came in 1952, called vulcanization, involves treating them
not only ated it1. He suggested when a Danish ecologist named Einar Steeman- with sulphur containing some zinc and tiny
reflected the that as phytoplankton Nielsen introduced an important technique that amounts of lead. These metals leached from the
chemical and the animals that would shed light on how carbon cycles in the O-rings and other components into the seawater
composition of ate them died and ocean. It enabled scientists to measure an ocean samples, where they poisoned the phytoplankton.
the deep ocean, sank to the bottom, ecosystem’s primary productivity — the amount As a result, the measurements of primary
but created it.” along with those ani- of organic matter that phytoplankton incorpo- production over three decades were compro-
mals’ faecal matter, rate into their bodies through photosynthesis mised, causing scientists to seriously underes-
microorganisms in the deep sea broke that after meeting their own energy needs. timate the importance of the world’s oceans for
material down into its chemical constituents, To make this measurement, Steeman-Nielsen the global carbon cycle.
creating sea water with the same proportions added bicarbonate containing a radioactive iso- Martin and others developed new sampling
of nitrogen and phosphorus. tope of carbon called carbon-14 to samples of techniques that kept samples as free as possible
The sea is not the only place where micro- sea water. When he exposed the samples to sun- of lead and other trace metals, allowing more
organisms shape the environment. Since Red- light, the phytoplankton in the samples incorpo- accurate measurements of phytoplankton’s
field’s time, scientists have discovered that rated carbon-14 into their tissues. By isolating primary productivity. But there was still a
microorganisms also helped shape the chemical the phytoplankton and measuring the radio- problem. Even with thousands of measurements
composition of our planet’s air and land. Most active decay of carbon-14 in their cells, scientists of primary productivity in the world’s oceans,
dramatically, trillions of phytoplankton created could calculate the total amount of carbon diox- most of the ocean was still not being observed
the planet’s breathable, oxygen-rich atmosphere. ide fixed into organic matter. in any given month or year. Mathematical meth-
By analysing a variety of minerals in rocks of Phytoplankton are the foundation of the ods could extrapolate from the primary produc-
known age, geologists discovered that for the ocean food web, providing organic matter for tivity data to help fill in the gaps, but not well
first half of Earth’s 4.6-billion-year history its virtually all other marine creatures. Their pri- enough. No one really knew how much carbon
atmosphere contained virtually no free oxy- mary productivity limits the growth of crusta- the world’s phytoplankton pulled from the water
gen — it only started accumulating 2.4 billion ceans, fish, sharks, porpoises and other marine around them.
years ago. They found rocks containing fossil- creatures, just as the primary productivity Obtaining reliable estimates of the ocean’s
ized cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae, whose of land plants limits the growth of elephants, primary productivity required a different
present-day cousins perform a type of photosyn- giraffes and monkeys. By determining the pro- approach. So scientists turned to data from the
thesis that uses the Sun’s energy to split water into ductivity of phytoplankton, marine scientists Coastal Zone Color Scanner (CZCS), launched
hydrogen and oxygen. There were no land plants can also determine how much carbon dioxide into space on a NASA satellite, which was able
to produce oxygen until almost 2 billion years is being taken from the atmosphere. to monitor the entire planet’s phytoplankton
after atmospheric oxygen levels first rose. It was For three decades, oceanographers used populations each week.
the oxygen these photosynthetic microorgan- Steeman-Nielsen’s carbon-14 technique to The CZCS took advantage of the fact that
isms that created our oxygen-rich atmosphere. answer an important ecological question: how oxygen-producing photosynthesis only occurs
Today, different groups of microorganisms, much organic mat- in organisms that have a pigment called chloro-
especially in the ocean, recycle waste produced ter do phytoplankton phyll a. This pigment enables the phytoplank-
by other microorganisms and use it to power produce globally? ton to absorb blue light, which would otherwise
global cycles of the elements most essential to The carbon-14 tech- be scattered by the sea water. The more phyto-
life. Cyanobacteria and other groups also con- nique helped them plankton there are in an area of ocean, the more
vert nitrogen gas (N2) into ammonium (NH4+), measure how quickly chlorophyll a there is and the darker the area
fixing this essential nutrient in a form they phytoplankton were appears from space. Oceanographers first cali-
can use to make the amino acids and proteins fixing carbon at thou- brated the colour of the ocean in CZCS photo-
they need to build and maintain cells. Differ- sands of sites across graphs with measures of primary productivity
ent microorganisms convert amino acids and the globe, but the such as that developed by Steeman-Nielsen, and
other organic nitrogen compounds to nitrogen- Q&A Paul Falkowski estimates of primary then used the colour measurements to obtain
containing gases, returning them to the atmos- A slow-motion productivity they better mathematical estimates of phytoplank-
crisis
phere. And others help drive the recycling of generated were far too ton productivity than were previously available.
different elements essential for life, including PAGE S21 low. They calculated The results from several groups of scientists
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LENSES ON BIOLOGY OUTLOOK
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OUTLOOK LENSES ON BIOLOGY
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