(Press-News.org) Offshore the Svalbard archipelago, methane gas is seeping out of the seabed at the depths of several hundred meters. These cold seeps are a home to communities of microorganisms that survive in a chemosynthetic environment - where the fuel for life is not the sun, but the carbon rich greenhouse gas.
There is a large, and relatively poorly understood, community of methane-consuming bacteria in this environment. They gorge on the gas, control its concentration in the ocean, and stop it from reaching the ocean surface and released into the atmosphere.
In the atmosphere methane is a much more potent climate gas than CO2 and it can amplify current global warming.
However, a new study published in Nature Geoscience shows that ocean currents can have a strong impact on this bacterial methane filter.
Varies drastically
Oceanographer Benedicte Férré, who is a team leader at CAGE, is a co-author of the study. It shows that the level of activity of the methane-consuming bacteria varied drastically over very short time spans.
The international team of scientists behind this study was able to detect that the fluctuations in bacterial communities changed at the whim of the West Spitsbergen Current that carries warm water from Norwegian Sea to Arctic Ocean. Important oceanographic factors such as water temperature and salinity changed.
The warm and salty current swept over the methane seeping sites, and carried bacteria communities away, thus disturbing methane filtration processes.
Important for the future release
This bacteria filter could become even more important in the future, because environmental change can cause bottom water warming in the Arctic Ocean.
As a consequence methane rich gas hydrates in the ocean floor dissociate, and release even more gas to the water column. This could increase food supply for bacteria. But whether bacteria are able to consume the methane depends on ocean current dynamics as documented by Ferre and her team.
Future methane release from the ocean to the atmosphere will depend on ocean currents.
"We were able to show that strength and variability of ocean currents control the prevalence of methanotrophic bacteria", says Lea Steinle from University of Basel and the lead author of the study, "therefore, large bacteria populations cannot develop in a strong current, which consequently leads to less methane consumption."
INFORMATION:
A new study shows how pharmacies might collaborate with physicians and families to reduce asthma-related illness.
The Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center study found that pharmacies in neighborhoods with high rates of asthma-related emergency-room use and hospitalization filled fewer asthma controller medications compared to asthma rescue medications.
Asthma-related illness is particularly common among people living in poverty or with limited access to medical care. Previous studies have shown that disparities in asthma rates are perpetuated by underuse of ...
As the realities of legalized marijuana take hold in four states and the District of Columbia, legislators and regulators could learn a lot from the successes -- and failures -- of the tobacco and alcohol industries in keeping their harmful products out of the hands of children and adolescents.
So say three Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health researchers in a commentary published May 4 in the journal Pediatrics.
"The early days of marijuana legalization present a unique window of opportunity to create a regulatory environment that minimizes youth access," ...
A group of Cambridge computer scientists have set a new gold standard for openness and reproducibility in research by sharing the more than 200GB of data and 20,000 lines of code behind their latest results - an unprecedented degree of openness in a peer-reviewed publication. The researchers hope that this new gold standard will be adopted by other fields, increasing the reliability of research results, especially for work which is publicly funded.
The researchers are presenting their results at a talk today (4 May) at the 12th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design ...
PHILADELPHIA - Gene therapy for Leber congenital amaurosis (LCA), an inherited disorder that causes loss of night- and day-vision starting in childhood, improved patients' eyesight within weeks of treatment in a clinical trial of 15 children and adults at the Scheie Eye Institute at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. New results involving a subset of patients from the ongoing trial show that these benefits peaked one to three years after treatment and then diminished. The findings are published today in The New England Journal of Medicine.
In ...
MEDFORD/SOMERVILLE, Mass. (May 3, 2015) -- A Tufts University study sheds new light on the process by which DNA repair occurs within the cell. In research published in the May 15 edition of the journal Genes & Development and available May 4 online in advance of print, Tufts University biologist Catherine Freudenreich and her co-authors show that expanded repeats of the CAG/CTG trinucleotide (CAG) in yeast shift to the periphery of the cell nucleus for repair. This shift is important for preventing repeat instability and genetic disease.
CAG expansions are significant ...
Young people are aware of the risks of cyberbullying but perceive others as being more at risk than themselves. Young women are more vulnerable to this perception than young men.
This is the finding of a study by Dr Lucy Betts and Sondos Metwally from Nottingham Trent University (NTU) that will be presented as part of the poster presentation session at the British Psychological Society's Annual Conference next week (Thursday 7 May 2015) hosted in Liverpool.
A survey, designed to measure how vulnerable young people felt to cyberbullying and how vulnerable they felt ...
PHOENIX and SAN FRANCISCO -- May 1, 2015 -- Led by the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) and UC San Francisco (UCSF), a comprehensive genetic review of treatment strategies for glioblastoma brain tumors was published today in the Oxford University Press journal Neuro-Oncology.
The study, Towards Precision Medicine in Glioblastoma: The Promise and The Challenges, covers how these highly invasive and almost-always-deadly brain cancers may be treated, reviews the continuing challenges faced by researchers and clinicians, and presents the hope for better treatments ...
Young children with autism spectrum disorder, who also have serious behavioral problems, showed improved behavior when their parents were trained with specific, structured strategies to manage tantrums, aggression, self-injury, and non-compliance.
The findings from this parent training study by Yale and Emory University researchers were published recently in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a chronic condition beginning in early childhood and defined by impaired social communication and repetitive behavior. ...
Expanding what we know about college students mixing alcohol with energy drinks, investigators from Dartmouth's Norris Cotton Cancer Center found teens aged 15-17 years old who had ever mixed alcohol with energy drinks were four times more likely to meet the criteria for alcohol use disorder than a teen who has tried alcohol but never mixed it with an energy drink. The Dartmouth team, led by James D. Sargent, MD with first author Jennifer A. Emond, MSc, PhD published "Energy drink consumption and the risk of alcohol use disorder among a national sample of adolescents and ...
Procrastination is the thief of time that derails New Year's resolutions and delays saving for college or retirement, but researchers have found a way to collar it.
The trick? Think of the future as now.
"The simplified message that we learned in these studies is if the future doesn't feel imminent, then, even if it's important, people won't start working on their goals," said Daphna Oyserman, lead researcher and co-director of the USC Dornsife Mind and Society Center.
Through a series of scenarios, Oyserman and co-author Neil Lewis Jr. of the University of Michigan ...
