A new study suggests that melting icebergs may be helping in the slowdown of climate change, fighting against the very forces that cause them to melt, Huggington Post reports.
The study was published Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience.
"It's another component of the climate change story," Grant R. Bigg, a professor in Earth systems science at the University of Sheffield and the author of the new study, told The Christian Science Monitor in an interview.
"If giant icebergs hadn't existed, then the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would have gone up even more than it currently has. It's been something which has helped to slow down the rate of increase of carbon dioxide and therefore climate change."
Researchers said that water from the icebergs that flows into the Antarctic Ocean contains iron and other nutrients that fertilize phytoplankton.
The phytoplankton help the tiny plants absorb carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as they grow into plumes. Therefore, it helps in maintaining the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Dr. Grant Bigg said, "Previous research had shown that there was a fertilizing effect from iceberg meltwater but no one had looked at the giant icebergs in a systematic way before. The extent, and strength, of the fertilized phytoplankton plume was the big surprise."
For the study, Bigg and his colleagues studied 175 satellite images taken between the years 2003 and 2013 that depict ocean water and 17 large icebergs in the Antarctic Ocean.
The researchers noted that the greenish color of the water indicated high levels of phytoplankton productivity. The phytoplankton plumes extended for hundreds of kilometers from the iceberg and persisted for almost a month after the iceberg passed by.
The researchers concluded that this process might be responsible for around 20 percent of carbon stored in the Atlantic ocean.
"The research is important as it has shown that there is more carbon stored in the Southern Ocean than previously calculated, which will have knock-on consequences for the global carbon budget," Bigg said.
"It also demonstrates an unusual negative feedback on climate -- even if it is a secondary one and merely slowing climate change."
However, scientists caution that this process cannot be interpreted to mean that it will save us from climate change.
"I would hate for somebody to look at this and say, see it's a negative feedback, we can do whatever we want and it's not going to have an effect," Dr. Ronald Kaufmann, a marine and environmental scientist at the University of San Diegowho who was not involved in the study, told The Christian Science Monitor.
"This is moving the needle back in the other direction, there's no question about that," he said. "But...I don't think this is going to offset the burning of coal, for example."
A team of scientists led by the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, further plans to investigate how much excess carbon dioxide the Antarctic Ocean is able to absorb.
