We are pleased to announce that the most recent work from Laura Korte - “Effects of dry and wet Saharan dust deposition in the tropical North Atlantic Ocean” - has been accepted for on-line publication on Biogeosciences Discussions! In her paper, Laura shows her results from three incubation experiments comprising Saharan dust additions to study the phytoplankton response to nutrient release in oligotrophic seawater conditions at three stations (M1, M3, M4) along the tropical North Atlantic. During the experiments, Laura has mimicked wet and dry deposition of low and high amounts of Saharan dust deposition from two different dust sources (paleo-lake and sand dune). The idea was to investigate whether wet dust deposition has or not a higher potential in terms of delivering bioavailable nutrients for phytoplankton communities. We look forward to a fruitful on-line discussion on this topic. Keep posted! :)
Map showing the sites at which dust incubation experiments were undertaken in the tropical North Atlantic. The color shading displays phosphate concentrations with values increasing from blue = 0 to red = 0.6 µmol L-1, and white lines represent silicate concentrations (µmol L-1) in the surface waters (Ocean Data View, 1955-2010 annual averages). Dust samples used for the experiments were collected in Mauritania, at a (b) a lake deposit, and (c) a sand dune field (Korte et al., 2018).