Amy Witter

Amy is a post-doctoral research scientist studying iron speciation in seawater. Iron speciation (or looking at the forms iron exists in solution) is important because   phytoplankton (plants in the sea) use iron to grow but they don't know how iron exists in seawater (ie. is it attached to other molecules or is it free in solution?) These questions are important because phytoplankton use carbon dioxide to grow and so they take up a lot of the excess CO2 that humans produce from industrial processes. The excess CO2 produced is responsible for something called the greenhouse effect, where the temperature of the earth's surface is rising because of this excess CO2. So plants which depend on iron which take up this CO2 may provide an answer to preventing this problem from becoming something which is detrimental to life on earth. Each day she works in the lab running samples using electrochemical equipment.

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