by www.thenewstribe.comNASA discovered that under the ice of the Arctic waters microscopic marine organisms are found in abundance.
However, researchers said it remains
unclear whether such fertility could have unexpected downsides for life
in the Arctic, The Christian Monitor said.
The single-celled organisms in question
are known as phytoplankton, which possess the green pigment chlorophyll
just as plants do, helping them live off sunlight.
Phytoplankton blooms spring up in the Arctic during the summer, when the sun is constantly above the horizon.
“As someone who has been studying polar
marine ecosystems for 25 years, I had always thought that the idea of
under-ice phytoplankton blooms was nonsense,” the website quoted
researcher Kevin Arrigo, a biological oceanographer at Stanford
University in California, as saying.
Researchers noted that the organism grows more rapidly under thick layers of ice.
“The idea that phytoplankton can not
only bloom under 3-foot-thick ice but that they can reach numbers that
put their open-water counterparts to shame was a complete surprise,”
Arrigo told OurAmazingPlanet. “It means we have to rethink many of our
ideas about how the Arctic Ocean ecosystems function.”
Kevin Arrigo of Stanford University, the
leader of the ICESCAPE (Impacts of Climate on EcoSystems and Chemistry
of the Arctic Pacific Environment) mission, said:
“If someone had asked me before the
expedition whether we would see under-ice blooms, I would have told them
it was impossible. This discovery was a complete surprise…. At this
point we don’t know whether these rich phytoplankton blooms have been
happening in the Arctic for a long time and we just haven’t observed
them before. These blooms could become more widespread in the future,
however, if the Arctic sea ice cover continues to thin.”
The ICESCAPE project’s findings were announced Thursday and published in the journal Science.
