By now, we have all heard of the visible filth, including microplastics, floating in and lying at the bottom of our ocean and seas, including the nearly closed Mediterranean. But there’s more – potentially harmful bacteria and viruses that are invisible to the human eye and can spread diseases and launch pandemics involving creatures in the water and animals and humans on their shores. Those tiny organisms, found everywhere on the Earth’s surface, are also important in influencing various processes, including soil health, pollutant decomposition, agricultural growth, and carbon sequestration.
Bacteria constitute about 70% of and play a very significant role in biogeochemical processes. Although they impact carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur cycles, little is known about their distribution and role in the environment. While scientists have identified the microbes, they have been in the dark about how they travel.
The research focuses, among other things, on the mutual influence (bio-exchanges) of the oceans and the atmosphere on the transportation of bacteria over the oceans. Dr. Naama Lang-Yona, now at the Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering in the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa and formerly of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot and other Weizmann researchers, have been investigating a lesser-known aspect related to those microorganisms – their distribution mechanisms, survival, and activity in the atmosphere.
Their studies have dramat.
