Scientists take phosphate 'fingerprints' of land and sea to study global change BY DAWN LEVY Shake a snow globe and clear skies turn to a blizzard in your hand. The Earth is a similarly closed system, with chemical reactions that occur in soil affecting chemical reactions that occur in skies and seas.
Chemistry is destiny.
Phosphorus also plays a key role in the cycles of such biologically essential elements as nitrogen, oxygen and sulfur. Because of analytical limitations, little was known about phosphorus cycling until recently. Barbara Cade-Menun collects soil from a freshly burned site in British Columbia in 1992. Prescribed burning after clearcutting converted phosphorus to forms less available to replanted trees. The new technologies and methods allow scientists to characterize phosphorus compounds in water and soil, estimate how fast phosphate cycles through natural reservoirs, estimate long-term phosphorus burial in the oceans through geologic time, pinpoint phosphorus sources in different ecosystems, determine fluctuations in phosphate concentrations at certain times and places, and study the effects of phosphorus pollution in estuaries and lakes.