A NASA-sponsored expedition has discovered a huge bloom of tiny undersea plants called phytoplankton that can significantly affect the life of all the sea creatures living beneath the Arctic ice. They termed the discovery as "rainforest in the middle of the desert."
The scientists discovered the plants when running an expedition in the deep waters of the Arctic. "The finding reveals a new consequence of the Arctic's warming climate and provides an important clue to understanding the impacts of a changing climate and environment on the Arctic Ocean and its ecology. The discovery was made during a NASA oceanographic expedition in the summers of 2010 and 2011," NASA said in a statement.
NASA stumbled upon the plants when they drilled a three foot thick ice in the Arctic waters of Beaufort and Chukchi seas. "The discovery was like finding the Amazon rainforest in the middle of the Mojave desert," said Paula Bontempi, NASA's ocean biology and biogeochemistry program manager in Washington.
"We embarked on ICESCAPE to validate our satellite ocean-observing data in an area of the Earth that is very difficult to get to," Bontempi said. "We wound up making a discovery that hopefully will help researchers and resource managers better understand the Arctic." she added.
The study was done using both on-site measurements and satellites. Scientists were looking for food source for ocean creatures. They sent a team to bring the ice pack from the Chukchi Sea and that's when they discovered phytoplankton biomass. The under-sea bloom extended for more than 60 miles (100 kilometers) into the ice pack on the Chukchi Sea continental shelf. Phytoplankton are actually the base of the marine food chain and are key to life on Earth as they account for about half of the total oxygen produced by all plant life. Kevin Arrigo, the mission leader and biological oceanographer at Stanford University in California, said, "the waters literally looked like pea soup."
"Just like the tomatoes in your garden, these and all phytoplankton require light and they require nutrients to grow," Arrigo added. As a very little sun light goes in that place, the researchers were not expecting to see such thing. Arrigo said the discovery caused "a fundamental shift in our understanding of the Arctic ecosystem."
"The mass of phytoplankton we found was truly astounding," Arrigo said. "It was the most intense I've ever seen in my 25 years of research in the Arctic. It was a complete surprise." People interested in knowing more about their findings can find the details in the journal Science released this Thursday.
