FOCUS SERIES
Series Editor Paul Tréguer
First published 2016 in Great Britain and the United States by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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© ISTE Ltd 2016
The rights of Stéphane Blain and Alessandro Tagliabuea to be identified as the authors of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016950076
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISSN 2051-2481 (Print)
ISSN 2051-249X (Online)
ISBN 978-1-84821-814-7
This book aims to present the multiple facets of the study of iron cycling in the ocean. The modern age of marine iron biogeochemistry started in the late 1980s concomitantly with the emergence of trace-metal clean techniques. At that time, only a few groups were able to produce data with the analytical quality required to reveal the first consistent distributions of iron concentrations in seawater and to begin identifying the underlying biogeochemical processes at work. After approximately four decades, there is now a considerable scientific effort underway by a growing community of “iron researchers”. Their research covers numerous fields where iron is studied from the gene level to the Earth system, from the atmosphere to the deep ocean, from a timescale of seconds to millennia.
This book is organized into seven chapters. The main topic of the book, iron, is presented in Chapter 1 “Iron Speciation in Seawater”, where the essential physicochemical properties and definitions (e.g. solubility, bioavailability) are introduced. This chapter is followed by the presentation of the available tools for investigating iron biogeochemistry in the ocean. This includes Chapter 2 that describes the “Analytical Methods” and Chapter 3 related to the “Modeling Methods”. With this background in hand, Chapter 4 “Iron Sources” presents the different pathways by which iron enters into the ocean. Once in the ocean, iron will continue to experience a multitude of transformations that are presented in Chapter 5 “Iron Cycling in the Ocean”.
The methods described in Chapters 2 and 3 together with the processes presented in Chapters 4 and 5 lay the foundation for understanding of processes controlling the distributions of iron in the ocean, which are described in Chapter 6 “Dissolved Iron Distributions in the Ocean”. Finally, Chapter 7 presents “The Iron Hypothesis”, the major trigger of the research field of marine iron biogeochemistry. This hypothesis is presented from the historical perspective that led to the design of small-scale artificial iron fertilization experiments and investigations of naturally iron-fertilized ocean regions. The implications of large-scale fertilization of the ocean in the context of climate engineering are presented and discussed.