Abstract
THE seasonal fluctuations in nutrient salts in European coastal waters and their bearing on the production of phytoplankton and ultimately on the fertility of the sea are now well understood. However, there are still huge areas of the waters of the world, including those adjacent to civilized countries carrying on original research, about which nothing whatever is known. Off the New South Wales coast, W. J. Dakin and A. N. Colefax (“Observations on the Seasonal Changes in Temperature, Salinity, Phosphates, and Nitrate Nitrogen and Oxygen of the Ocean Waters on the Continental Shelf off New South Wales and the Relationship to Plankton Production”, Proc. Linn. Soc. New South Wales, 60, 303-314; 1935. Sydney University Reprints, Ser. XIII (Zoology), 3, No. 8; 1936) have now found complete exhaustion of both phosphate and nitrate by spring and autumn phytoplankton outbursts. The depletion of nitrate persists through the summer as in the seas around Great Britain, but phosphate is replenished more quickly. On the whole, nutrient salts are less than were found in the English Channel in the nineteen twenties but are not very different from the reduced quantities found there now. It is to be hoped that the investigations will be continued for a number of years to discover whether similar long-period fluctuations take place in Australian temperate waters, and further, that a well-found ship may be obtained to permit of investigations over a wider area unhandi-capped by the difficulties of carrying on exact scientific work in the open ocean from the decks of a small yacht such as that at present in use.
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Oceanography in New South Wales. Nature 139, 580 (1937). https://doi.org/10.1038/139580c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/139580c0