Phosphorus

When she woke up, she was surrounded by rubble and burning fragments of phosphorus.

But unlike nitrogen, another critical soil nutrient, phosphorus is a non-renewable resource with limited geological deposits, meaning that once it moves from land to water, it can't get back into the land.

The rock evidence showed that the violent disturbances churned up nutrients like phosphorus and iron that fed simple organisms.

As a civil engineering student, Martinez had been interested in how phosphorus and nitrogen affect water quality, leading to algal blooms and low oxygen levels when discharged in high quantities into freshwater.

Dr Smith said this might have been caused by high concentrations of phosphorus in the ocean where this larva briefly lived and died.