Atmospheric Transport of Mold Spores

Atmospheric transport of mold spores

Climate changes are affecting us in ways that we hadn’t imagined. This is a very interesting article on how microbe particles can affect us from far as Africa & Asia.

DD
*****
Atmospheric transport of mold spores in clouds of desert dust

Archives of Environmental Health, August, 2003 by Eugene A. Shinn, Dale W. Griffin, Douglas B. Seba

THE DRAMATIC INCREASE in the transport of soil dust across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans during the past 30 yr has been well documented. (1-3) Although geological evidence indicates that African and Asian dusts have been crossing the oceans for eons, the flux of dust has more than doubled since 1970. (4) The timing and increase in volume of African dust flux can be attributed to the ongoing drought in North Africa that began around 1970. (1,5,6) Year-to-year variations in this flux are associated with cyclic latitudinal changes in the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), which is a large-scale, multiyear fluctuation in atmospheric pressure between the subtropical high-pressure system located near the Azores in the Atlantic Ocean and the subpolar low-pressure system near Iceland. Positive phases of the NAO--when the system is located at higher latitudes over the North Atlantic--result in increased aridity in the Sahara and Sahel regions of North Africa. These 1- to 3-yr shifts lead to greater dust generation and transport (Fig. 1). (7) On a global scale, regional weather and dust transport are also influenced by a periodic weather phenomenon known as the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO, a large-scale climatic fluctuation of the tropical Pacific Ocean). Since 1970, the highest quantities of transatlantic African dust movement have coincided approximately with ENSO events. The current and conservative estimate for the quantity of desert dust that is transported in Earth's atmosphere each year is approximately 2 billion metric tons. (8) Moving in association with this dust are an estimated 2 quadrillion microorganisms. (9)

Continuation of article

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0907/is_8_58/ai_n6127264