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The cross-nation and cross-school research that includes Prof. Mii Horng Sheng from the Department of Earth Science was published on Science. The principal investigator is Prof. Ren Hao Jia from NTNU while prof. Mii is the 8th author. The press conference by the Ministry of Technology was held on May 19th. 

 

With the rapid rise in pollution-associated nitrogen inputs to the western Pacific, it has been suggested that even the open ocean has been affected. In a coral core from Dongsha Atoll, a remote coral reef ecosystem, we observe a decline in the 15N/14N of coral skeleton–bound organic matter, which signals increased deposition of anthropogenic atmospheric N on the open ocean and its incorporation into plankton and, in turn, the atoll corals. The first clear change occurred just before 2000 CE, decades later than predicted by other work. The amplitude of change suggests that, by 2010, anthropogenic atmospheric N deposition represented 20 ± 5% of the annual N input to the surface ocean in this region, which appears to be at the lower end of other estimates.

The title of the study is “21st-century rise in anthropogenic nitrogen deposition on a remote coral reef” and the article can be found at http://science.sciencemag.org/content/356/6339/749.