Atmospheric Deposition Connected with Marine Primary Production,Nitrogen Cycle: A Review

Atmospheric Deposition (AD) provides external nutrients such as nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P) and iron (Fe) supporting the growth of phytoplankton in oceans and thereby exerts obvious impacts on carbon and nitrogen cycles and climate change associated. Specifically, the external nutrients derived from atmospheric deposition can promote the marine primary production and nitrogen fixation that enhance the ocean capacity in absorbing CO₂; AD may also change a few pathways of carbon and nitrogen cycles in oceans and increase the emissions of biogenic aerosol and radioactive gases such as N₂O, DMS, etc. Due to the underlying important impacts on climate and environmental change, AD and processes related have become the hot topics of multidisciplinary studies in the areas of ocean and atmospheric sciences, and the focus of some international core projects such as Surface Ocean Lower Atmosphere Study (SOLAS), an International Study of Marine Biogeochemical Cycles of Trace Elements and Their Isotopes (GEOTRACES) and Integrated Marine Biogeochemistry and Ecosystem Research (IMBER). With the severe air pollution and high frequencies of Asian dust events, as the downwind areas of big cities and dust sources, the East China Sea and adjacent North Pacific have received increasing influences of AD. Limited studies showed that the increase of AD indeed caused significant influence on carbon and nitrogen cycles in these immediately related oceanic areas and the study there would have a signature effect on global oceans. A multidisciplinary study on the impacts of AD in oceans, e.g., combing molecular biology and experimental ecology techniques to study primary production processes, utilizing isotopic techniques to trace the change of the nitrogen cycle, new evidences of ocean-biogenic aerosol emissions, etc. would be the focus in the future.