APPARATUS G: MONSTERS

Chinese fallouts are transforming the biochemistry of the world ocean. Desert dusts are crucial to planetary ecology (Field et al. 2010), and especially oceanic iron cycles.¹ In the high-nutrient low-chlorophyll (HNLC) region in the seas off Alaska, scientists have long observed low levels of larger phytoplankton-like diatoms despite high levels of ocean nitrogen, a crucial marine nutrient for the growth of phytoplankton biomass. The growth of plankton life is inhibited by low amounts of bioavailable iron.² Cycles of oceanic iron were disrupted by nineteenth-century whaling, when the precipitous decline in baleen whale populations across the world ocean removed whale excrement