We’re delighted that three publications with contributions from the BiCycles Lab have recently been published. These publications mark the first contributions from the lab, so we are even more excited!
The first publication is a commentary in Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences on a great article led by Patrick Williams of Maya Bhatia’s lab group at the University of Alberta (Nutrient and Carbon Export from a Tidewater Glacier to the Coastal Ocean in the Canadian High Arctic Archipeligo). To get you in the autumnal mood the title of our commentary has a Halloween theme – Trickle and treat? The critical role of marine terminating glaciers as icy macronutrient pumps in polar regions. In our commentary we take a look at Patrick’s paper and propose future research directions when it comes to ascertaining the role marine terminating glaciers (aka tidewater glaciers) are playing in regional biogeochemical cycles. Marine terminating glaciers are great at “pumping” deep nutrient-rich ocean water to the surface of coastal environments, where those nutrients help sustain primary production (photosynthesis).
The second publication in Geochemical Perspectives Letters has been in the pipeline for a while and is led by the fantastic Jade Hatton (currently at Charles University in Prague). This is Jade’s third paper to come out of her PhD at the University of Bristol and is based on some incubation experiments she undertook to figure out how a mineral called amorphous silica forms on particles that derive from the physical and chemical weathering of rock beneath glaciers/ice sheets. Understanding this process is really important because amorphous silica is a super reactive mineral that could dissolve and release silicon in downstream environments – silicon is an essential element for a number of organisms, most notably diatoms who build their cell walls out of the stuff. This amorphous silica also appears to have a distinctive silicon isotopic ratio that could help trace its fate in the environment. This work highlights the importance of physical crushing of rock by flowing glaciers in creating amorphous silica and mobilizing it into waters flowing out of the glacier.
Finally, the BiCycles Lab also involved in a publication in Biogeochemistry coming out of the Spencer Biogeochemistry Lab at Florida State University led by Derrick Vaughn and Anne Kellerman. This study focuses on the concentration of dissolved organic carbon and the associated composition of dissolved organic matter (C-containing molecules) in waters of the Upper Mississippi River Basin. Dissolved organic matter was characterized using a powerful technique called Fourier-transform ion cyclotron resonance mass spectrometry (FT-ICR MS). FT-ICR MS is an ultra high resolution mass spectrometry technique to determine the composition of organic matter to the individual compound level. The aim of the study was to figure out if land use type (i.e., natural land use vs human perturbed land) changes the concentration and composition of organic matter in rivers. It turns out that changing land cover from a forest to agriculture or urban does have a pretty large impact on the quantity and quality of organic matter entering the river. This is important because more labile (i.e., yummier for microbes!) organic matter likely comes off human-impacted catchment, which decreases the half life of that organic matter before it’s respired by microbes, with associated implications for riverine biogeochemical cycling.