The Gulf of Maine and the Arabian Sea may have little in common, but blooms of phytoplankton in both places are teaching Maine scientists about global warming.

Our story Thursday about Andrew Pershing’s research explained how melting ice in the Arctic Ocean and pulses of freshwater entering the Gulf of Maine led to an explosion of phytoplankton in the 1990s. Pershing, who co-authored a paper about the changes in the journal Science, is a research oceanographer at both the University of Maine and the Gulf of Maine Research Institute. He is based at the Institute in Portland.

Today, we learned that two scientists from the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in West Boothbay Harbor have received a $1.18 million grant from NASA to study the impact of global warming on life in the Arabian Sea.

Joaquim Goés and Dr. Helga do Rosario Gomes have already documented how warming global temperatures are melting snow in Himalayan-Tibetan mountain ranges and driving a complex chain of events that includes large blooms of phytoplankton in the Arabian Sea. The sea is more self-contained than the Gulf of Maine, and the phytoplankton growth there has acted like an algae bloom on a Maine pond – dying plankton are depleting oxygen from the sea water, contributing to large fish kills off the coast of Oman.

The Arabian Sea, it turns out is an ideal laboratory for climate change studies, Goés said. “The ramifications of the study are huge.” An article on the NASA website describes the pair’s work and why melting in the Himalayas could be catastrophic for the Arabian Sea.

Goés and Gomes will head to the Arabian Sea this summer, and plan to take some Maine students along. The project is expected to last three years.

The fact that researchers from the coast of Maine are studying the Arabian Sea is not as strange as it may seem. Scientists from Maine universities and research institutions work virtually all over the world these days, from the South Pole to the Arctic Circle. A lot of their work now is focusing on how a shifting global climate will affect places – like the Arabian Sea and Gulf of Maine – across the planet.

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