This is a scientific American 60 second science. I'm Christopher Intalyata. Got a minute?

Massive ice sheet on top of Greenland is losing nearly 300 billion tons a year to melting, according to NASA estimates.

And all that meltwater means rising seas.

But it's also dumping huge amounts of nutrients and minerals into Arctic waters.

And the great thing about glaciers and ice sheets is that they're like these big, very heavy systems

and they, as they move over rock, they grind and crush the rock up.

John Hawking's a glacial biogeochemist at the University of Bristol in the UK.

So they expose all these reactive kind of trace components of the rock lattice to the fresh

melt water that's coming in. All that meltwater funnels rock dust into

Greenland's glacial rivers where Hawkins and his colleagues took their

samples.

They found that Greenland's rivers are much richer in phosphorus than previously believed.

And they estimate that Greenland's glacial rivers may flush some 400,000 tons of phosphorus into ocean waters every year.

That's on par with the amount of phosphorus dumped into the ocean by the Mississippi or

Amazon rivers.

The findings appear in the journal Global Biogeochemical

cycles. All that extra phosphorus could be fertilizer for ocean life.

It's an essential nutrient for phytoplankton who are the guys on the bottom of the food chain.

So it's really really important for life and life can't exist without it.

In this process of Glacier's grinding rocks, then melting and flushing those nutrients to see, it's not the first

time it's happened.

In fact, the authors speculate that during the last extreme ice age, the so-called

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