If storms become stronger in the future due to climate change, more nitrogen may be released from the bottom of coastal seas.
If storms become stronger in the future due to climate change, more nitrogen may be released from the bottom of coastal seas. This is shown by research of marine biogeochemist Dunia Rios-Yunes at The Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ) in Yerseke. Rios-Yunes will defend her PhD-thesis on March 1st at the University of Utrecht. “The dynamics of nutrients in deltas and estuaries have been a bit of a blind spot for marine science, so far”, she says.
Inflatable Couch
For her experiments, Rios-Yunes spent many hours on an inflatable couch on the dry bottom of the Wester- and the Oosterschelde. “I mimicked a storm on the mud, using a bucket without a bottom and a big blender, stirring up the mud and measuring the release or the uptake of nitrogen and phosphorous. But, since I needed to do this for six hours in a row, I rapidly found out that I needed a little bit of comfort, sitting on the mud. The inflatable couch was my life saver during the field work”, she says jokingly.
As frivolous as it may seem - mixing mud in an open bucket - this experiment is indeed a good model for a real storm, Rios-Yunes emphasizes. "We only mixed the top millimeters to a maximum of three centimeters of the sediment, whereas a real storm can stir up the soil to 20 cm deep. Also, the speeds of our mixer were lower than what sometimes happens in real life during a severe storm. Reality can, therefore, be more severe
Read more at Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research
Image: Taking water samples from the erosion experiment in the Oosterschelde. In the photo Alena di Primio and Dunia Rios-Yunes. (Credits: Tim Grandjean via Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research)
