Nitrogen fixing, a process essential for life and commonly thought to take place mostly in the Atlantic Ocean, is also happening in the Pacific and Indian oceans, according to a recent article by a UW School of Oceanography researcher.

Nitrogen gas is unusable by life and must undergo fixation before it is able to form compounds. The important process supplies the ocean with nutrients.

"Nitrogen fixation converts N-2, the most abundant gas in our atmosphere, to ammonium, which is used to make proteins and nucleic acids," said Paul Falkowski, an Institute of Marine & Coastal Sciences professor at Rutgers University and report contributor. "Nitrogen fixation is absolutely essential for all life. Without it, there would no life on Earth as we know it."

Denitrification is the opposite of nitrogen fixing.

This happens when fixed nitrogen is turned back into a gas. It was once thought that these two processes happened on opposite sides of the world, but the research shows they are happening close to each other.

If these two processes happened on opposite sides of the world, as formerly thought, the nitrogen levels in the ocean would be difficult to balance if any changes occurred in either fixation or denitrification.

"As the Earth comes out of ice ages ... one of the consequences is that the rate of denitrification goes up dramatically," said Curtis Deutsch, a UW School of Oceanography post-doctoral researcher. "We know that, in fact, the Earth in the past has had really large fluctuations in the rate of denitrification that were directly tied to major climate changes."

The study shows that the ability of the ocean to respond to these changes is more rapid than previously thought.

"There is another philosophical/scientific issue that underlies all of this, which is the extent to which biological processes in the ocean have negative and positive feedbacks that are able to keep the earth system in check," said Jorge Sarmiento, co-author of the study and professor of geosciences at Princeton University.

Research for this project was performed using computer model simulations and new high-quality nutrient distribution observations obtained over the past few decades.

This is a case in which a large collection of observations was interpreted in a new way.

"The ocean isn't bulletproof," Deutsch said. "For particular types of changes that we know have happened in the history of the earth, we can see how the ocean might have established a new type of balance."

Reach contributing writer Sarah Greenleaf at development@thedaily.washington.edu.