Oliver Chadwick from the University of California, Santa Barbara, said they were able to track the African dust to the rain forest floor.

“Hawaii is one of the least dusty places in the world. It’s one of the most remote archipelagos in the world and receives very little dust. And yet, we’ve been able to demonstrate that the phosphorus that’s carried by the dust and deposited on the old landscapes in Kauai actually fertilizes the forest.”

Chadwick told Scientific American that “Through the atmosphere, all parts of terrestrial ecosystems, forests, grasslands, are linked in a very effective way.”

They are linked, at least for now.

This brings up another factor of global climate change that is little understood, namely how ecosystems will change beyond weather and climate. If the global climate changes by a few degrees, the jet streams that carry this dust to Hawaii could land elsewhere. Hawaiian rainforests might not outright wither and die, but they could change drastically. New growth that depends on fertilization might slow and the forests could thin dramatically.

Without this bit of dust, people will be forced to fertilize entire forest on their own or watch a rain forest become a normal forest devoid of the oxygen-creating environment.

So losing this bit of dust in the wind could further exacerbate climate change.

[Via Scientific American]

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“Imagine the amount of energy it takes for the global communications network to operate for one day. That same amount of power would represent three years of operation in this new network.”

That’s Gee Rittenhouse, director of research for Alcatel-Lucent’s Bell Labs, at a launch event today in London. Rittenhouse and crew run the “Green Touch” initiative, which seeks a 1,000-fold decrease in the amount of power our IT structures require.

As we’ve reported before in Technomaly, huge servers and data centers emit 300 million tons of carbon dioxide per year, or about 3% of our carbon output. Green Touch seeks to slash that output by focusing on “a common reference architecture, set of specifications and road map for a new, energy-efficient ICT paradigm.”

Rittenhouse isn’t alone – the Green Touch group includes heavy hitters like AT&T, China Mobile, MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics, Stanford University’s Wireless Systems Lab, the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology and the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control. That’s a lot of muscle. This clash of the science titans could come up with something we can actually use!

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