Dionysios Raitsos and colleagues show that dust from drought-stricken Southern Africa caused a bloom of marine phytoplankton off the southeast Madagascar coast from November 2019 through February 2020. The team used standardized anomalies of dust aerosol optical depth from the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) and in situ coarse mode aerosol optical depth retrieved by a nearby Aerosol Robotic Network (AERONET) station to quantify the density of atmospheric dust aerosols over the Madagascar area through time.
The findings are published in PNAS Nexus.
According to the authors, as the climate warms, additional phytoplankton blooms caused by the same mechanism are to be expected—and these blooms could take up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
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