Saharan dust influences global warming?
Could Saharan dust potentially compensate for the ongoing global warming by fertilising the oceans? A €2-million ERC starting investigator grant will allow Jan-Berend Stuut at NIOZ, Texel, the Netherlands, to test this hypothesis. This five-year research project shall start October 1st of this year.
The main aim of the project is to study the marine environmental effects of Saharan-dust deposition on the Atlantic Ocean. About 1 billion ton dust is dispersed from the Sahara each year, and most of this material is deposited in the ocean. Saharan dust contains many nutrients and metals, of which iron is well known to be essential for marine algae and plankton, and which could stimulate plankton- and algae growth. Since these marine micro-organisms also sequester the greenhouse gas CO2 from the atmosphere, dust could potentially influence global climate change.
The five-year project shall start in October 2012 with a research cruise onboard the German research vessel Meteor sailing from the Cape Verdian Islands across the Atlantic into the Caribbean. Ten submarine sediment traps shall be deployed along a transect at 12°N, which will monitor Saharan dust and its marine environmental effects. In addition, a floating dust collector will be constructed and deployed in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, which, combined with satellite remote sensing data, shall monitor temporal changes in Saharan dust dispersal and deposition.
Jan-Berend Stuut was awarded a €1.97 million ERC (European Research Council) Starting Grant to carry out the project ‘DustTraffic: Transatlantic Fluxes of Saharan Dust’. Next to his employment at NIOZ, Jan-Berend Stuut is also working part-time at MARUM, Bremen. Next to Stuut, the project will encompass a PhD student and a post-doctoral researcher as well as a technician.
Jan-Berend Stuut enjoys working in the desert.
West-African dust storm (foto Jutta Leyrer, NIOZ)