资源环境科技发展态势分析平台

The iron (Fe) supply to phytoplankton communities in the surface Southern Ocean exerts a strong control on oceanic carbon storage and global climate. Hydrothermal vents are one potential Fe source to this region, but it is not known whether hydrothermal Fe persists in seawater long enough to reach the surface before it is removed by particle scavenging. A new study [Jenkins 2020] fills an important gap in this puzzle: a helium‐3 mass balance model is used to show that it takes ~100 years for deep hydrothermally‐influenced waters to upwell to the surface around Antarctica. However, estimates of Fe scavenging timescales range from tens to hundreds of years, and must be more narrowly constrained to fully resolve the role of hydrothermal Fe in the ocean’s biological pump.