As Greenland ice covers itself, it feeds the tiny oceanic organisms. To test why, scientists turned to a computer model from JPL and MIT which was called a laboratory in itself.
The runoff of the Greenland ice cream cap kicked the nutrients of the depths of the ocean and the growth of phytoplankton growth, revealed a new study supported by NASA. Report in nature communications: Earth & Environment, scientists used the end of art to simulate marine life and physics collided in a turbulent fjord. The oceanographers want to understand what motivates the tiny plant organisms, which occupy carbon dioxide and the power of fisheries in the world.
Greenland’s mile thick -thick -thickness cap loses some 293 billion tonnes (266 billion metric tonnes) of ice per year. During the tip of the summer melting, more than 300,000 gallons (1,200 cubic meters) of fresh water in the sea every second of the Jakobshavn glacier, also known as Sermeq Kujalleq, the most active glacier glacier. The waters meet and fall to hundreds of feet below the surface.
The plume of cast iron water is fresh and more dynamic than surrounding salt water. As scientists have hypothesized, it may be to provide nutrients like iron and nitrate – a key fertilizer ingredient – with floating phytoplankton on the surface.
The researchers follow these microscopic organisms because, although from a distance smaller, they are titans of the Ocean Food Web. By living each ocean from the tropics to the polar regions, they nourish the Krill and other grazers who, in turn, support the largest animals, including fish and whales.
Previous work using satellite data of NASA revealed that the growth rate of phytoplankton in Arctic waters had jumped by 57% between 1998 and 2018. A infusion of nitrate of the depths would be particularly crucial of the phytoplankton of Greenland in summer, after most nutrients were consumed by the proliferations of anterior spring. But the hypothesis was difficult to test along the coast, where the distant terrain and the icebergs as large as the blocks of the city complicate long -term observations.
“We were confronted with this classic problem to try to understand a system so far away and buried under the ice,” said Dustin Carroll, an oceanographer at the San José State University which is also affiliated with the NASA laboratory propulsion in Southern California. “We needed a jewel of a computer model to help you.”
To recreate what was going on in the waters of the most active glacier in Greenland, the team operated a model of the ocean developed at JPL and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. The model ingests almost all of the available oceanic measures collected by sea -based and satellite instruments in the past three decades. This represents billions of data points, water temperature and salinity to the pressure at the seabed. The model is called estimate of the ocean-Darwin (ECCO-Darwin to be short).
The simulation of “biology, chemistry and physics come together” in a single pocket along 27,000 miles from Greenland (43,000 kilometers) of Côte is a massive mathematical problem, the main author of Michael Wood, an IT oceanographer at the State University of San José. To decompose it, he said that the team had built a “model in a model in a model” to zoom in on the details of the fjord at the foot of the glacier.
Using supercomputers at the NASA Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, they calculated that deep water nutrients increased by winding would be sufficient to increase the growth of phytoplankton in summer by 15 to 40% in the study area.
Could the increase in phytoplankton be a boon for marine animals and Greenland fisheries? Carroll said that the impacts untangled on the ecosystem will take time. The melting on the Greenland ice cap should accelerate in the coming decades, affecting everything, from sea level and terrestrial vegetation to the salinity of coastal waters.
“We have rebuilt what is happening in a key system, but there are more than 250 of these glaciers through Greenland,” said Carroll. He noted that the team planned to extend its simulations to the whole coast of Greenland and beyond.
Certain changes seem to have an impact on the carbon cycle both positively and negatively: the team calculated how the glacier runoff modifies the temperature and chemistry of sea water in the fjord, which makes it less capable of dissolving carbon dioxide. This loss is however canceled by the largest phytoplankton flowers occupying more carbon dioxide in the air while they photosynthesize.
Wood added: “We have not built these tools for a specific application. Our approach is applicable to any region, from the Gulf of Texas to Alaska. Like a Swiss knife, we can apply it to many different scenarios.”
Jane J. Lee / Andrew Wang
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.
626-379-6874 / 818-354-0307
jane.j.lee@jpl.nasa.gov / Andrew.wang@jpl.nasa.gov
Written by Sally Younger
2025-101
