• Suzanne Jacobs
• climate
• communications
• January 15, 2016
• 0 Comments

These bacterial communities are heating up the desert

Do you ever feel like this is a microbial world, and that we’re just living in it? It seems like every day, scientists are discovering new ways that these invisible communities are manipulating our health, impacting the climate, keeping ecosystems in check, and (maybe) occasionally killing off more than 70 percent of all species on Earth. Well, now we can add one more thing to their resume: heating up the desert. According to a new paper published in Nature Communications, bacterial communities that form on arid soil can increase surface temperatures by as much as 10 degrees C. They do this by secreting a kind of “sunscreen” that, while protecting the microbes themselves from harmful ultraviolet light, actually absorbs sunlight that would otherwise reflect off the soil…