Connecting the sea, sky and human health

Tiny organisms living in the oceans could be playing a significant role in human health, an audience at this year’s BA Festival of Science will hear today (8 September).

Professor Peter Liss of the University of East Anglia (UEA) School of Environmental Sciences will talk about how microscopic marine organisms called plankton produces gases that can travel in the atmosphere until they ultimately get deposited on land. Here they can become important in supplying micronutrients to human diets, for example through uptake into agricultural crops.

“We have recently shown that the micronutrient selenium, which is needed to keep our bodies healthy, can be traced back from land to formation by plankton in the oceans,” said Professor Liss.

Understanding more about how selenium transfers from the oceans to the atmosphere and then onto land may help the element to be obtained naturally rather than in the form of a dietary supplement, which some people currently take.

Selenium deposition from the atmosphere onto the land drops off with distance from the coast, so it has been suggested that people living closer to the sea are better supplied naturally with the element.

As well as selenium, Professor Liss will talk about the elements sulphur and iodine, both of which are formed in the ocean and cycled through the atmosphere onto land.