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#Earth s wobble fixes food for ocean creatures Princeton university rightoriginal Studyposted by Catherine Zandonella-Princeton on September 16 2013the cyclic wobble of the Earth on its axis controls the production of ixednitrogen which is essential to the health of the ocean according to a new study. The findings published in Nature give researchers insight into how the ocean regulates its own life-support system which in turn affects the Earth s climate and the size of marine fisheries. Researchers report that during the past 160000 years nitrogen fixation rose and fell in a pattern that closely matched the changing orientation of Earth s axis of rotation or axial precession. Axial precession occurs on a cycle of roughly 26000 years and arises because the Earth wobbles slightly as it rotates similar to the wobble of a toy top. Studies from the 1980s revealed that precession leads to a regular upwelling of deep water in the equatorial Atlantic ocean roughly every 23000 years. The upwelling in turn brings nitrogen-poor water to the surface where blue-green algae convert nitrogen drawn from the air into a form that is biologically usable. The finding that nitrogen fixation is determined by precession-driven upwelling appears to indicate that the ocean s fixed nitrogen reservoir is resilient and that the ocean biosphere can recover from even the most dramatic ecological changes says second author Daniel Sigman professor of geological and geophysical sciences at Princeton university. y studying the response of nitrogen fixation to different environmental changes in the Earth s past we have found connections that may ensure that the ocean s fixed nitrogen level will always reboundsigman says. his suggests that an ocean over time has a relatively stable nutrient reservoir and thus stable productivity. he rise of deep water spurs nitrogen fixation because that water is low in nitrogen but contains an excess of another key nutrient phosphorus Sigman says. The phosphorus fuels the fixing of nitrogen carried out by blue-green algae also known as cyanobacteria. he phosphorus-rich nitrogen-poor water is a boon to cyanobacteria that can fix their own nitrogensigman says. y growing more rapidly the nitrogen-fixers top up the fixed nitrogen to the levels needed by other phytoplankton. he researchers tracked changes in nitrogen fixation in the North atlantic ocean by measuring the fixed nitrogen contained in the shells of marine animals recovered from sediment in the Caribbean sea. Working in Sigman s lab the investigators measured the amount of two types of nitrogen known as 14n and 15n contained in the shells of tiny marine animal plankton called foraminifera. The ratio of 15n to 14n was used then to reconstruct the rate of nitrogen fixation. The pattern of nitrogen fixation measured in foraminifera matched the historical record of axial precession and the resulting ocean upwelling. The investigators also compared the fluctuations in nitrogen fixation to historical records of water temperature and levels of ironâ##another crucial nutrientâ##both of which influence cyanobacteria survival and thus nitrogen fixation. No correlation was found. ur findings suggest that this upwelling was the dominant influence on nitrogen fixationsigman says. Douglas Capone a professor and chair of biological sciences at the University of Southern California says that the research is notable both for understanding the nitrogen cycle and for providing a method to study it. have pondered long and hoped for ways to reconstruct deeper historical trends in this important nitrogen-cycle processcapone says. he new study by the Sigman and Haug groups is a major breakthrough in providing a means to do this along with throwing light on the major controls on this key process over long time scales. dditional researchers from Princeton The swiss Institute of technology in Zurich (ETH) and Columbia University Lamont-doherty earth observatory. The swiss and US National Science Foundations and Princeton s Grand Challenges Program supported the research. Source: Princeton Universityyou are free to share this article under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noderivs 3. 0 Unported license t

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