Brown algae take up large amounts of carbon dioxide from the air and release parts of the carbon contained therein back into the environment in mucous form. This mucus is hard to break down for other ocean inhabitants, thus the carbon is removed from the atmosphere for a long time, as researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen now show. They reveal that the algal mucus called fucoidan is particularly responsible for this carbon removal and estimate that brown algae could thus remove up to 550 million tons of carbon dioxide from the air every year – almost the amount of Germany's entire annual greenhouse gas emissions.
When bacteria, fungi, mosses, lichens and algae combine on dry land, they form so-called biological soil crusts. These cover about twelve percent of the total global land surface, and up to one third of the surface in dry areas. Biological soil crusts play an important role in consolidating soils, making them more stable and less likely to be stirred up by the wind. Since dust particles in the atmosphere have an impact on the climate, soil crusts fulfil an important function in several respects. An international team of researchers around biologist Bettina Weber of the University of Graz and research associate of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry provide, for the first time, comprehensive facts and figures on the importance of biological soil crusts for the regional and global dust cycle, both under current and future conditions.
Life on Earth today relies on the presence of oxygen. However, the process behind the step-wise rise of oxygen levels in the atmosphere, which took place over nearly two billion years, remains under debate. An international team of scientists around Judith Klatt from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen, Germany, proposes an intriguing explanation: that increasing daylength, resulting from slowing Earth rotation, may have allowed microbes to release more oxygen, thereby creating the air we breathe today.
