How Desert Dust Feeds the World's Oceans

From LiveScience.com:

In mid-February, at the height of Austral summer, the sun in the Antarctic never sets. Nor did the work ever stop for University of Hawaii oceanography professor Chris Measures and his team of trace-metals oceanographers, who worked around the clock measuring dust from the decks of the Scripps Insitution of Oceanography research vessel Roger Revelle. The researchers affixed bouquets of trumpet-shaped filters to the ship's mast to trap dust from the air, and for every degree of longitude, they sampled the sea, plunging a contraption of cylindrical bottles to the depths of the upper ocean, screening water for remnants of dissolved dust and the trace amounts of iron and aluminum they contain.

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