Scientists Discover 'Rainforest' of Life Under Arctic Sea Ice

June 08, 2012 from Futurity

Scientists have made a biological discovery in Arctic Ocean waters as dramatic and unexpected as finding a rainforest in the middle of a desert. A NASA-sponsored expedition investigating the effects of climate change on Arctic waters punched through three-foot thick sea ice to find the massive phytoplankton bloom. It makes these waters richer in microscopic marine plants -- essential to all sea life -- than any other ocean region on Earth. Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center. Under-ice footage courtesy of Karen Frey (Clark University) http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a010000/a010900/a010907/

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Arctic Ocean

The Arctic Ocean, located in the Northern Hemisphere and mostly in the Arctic north polar region, is the smallest and shallowest of the world's five major oceanic divisions. The International Hydrographic Organization recognizes it as an ocean, although some oceanographers cal... Explore this topic

Phytoplankton

Phytoplankton are the autotrophic, mixotrophic and heterotrophic component of the plankton community. The name comes from the Greek words φυτόν, meaning "plant", and πλαγκτός, meaning "wanderer" or "drifter". Most phytoplankton are too small to be individually seen with the un... Explore this topic

Sea ice

Sea ice is frozen seawater. Because ice is less dense than its melt, sea ice floats. Sea ice covers about 7% of the Earth’s surface, or about 12% of the world’s oceans. In the North, it is found in the Arctic Ocean, in areas just below it and in other cold oceans, seas and gul... Explore this topic

Chukchi Sea

Chukchi Sea is a marginal sea of the Arctic Ocean. It is bounded on the west by the De Long Strait, off Wrangel Island, and in the east by Point Barrow, Alaska, beyond which lies the Beaufort Sea. The Bering Strait forms its southernmost limit and connects it to the Bering Sea... Explore this topic

NASA

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is the agency of the United States government that is responsible for the nation's civilian space program and for aeronautics and aerospace research. President Eisenhower established the National Aeronautics and Space Administr... Explore this topic

Marine biology

Marine biology is the scientific study of organisms in the ocean or other marine or brackish bodies of water. Given that in biology many phyla, families and genera have some species that live in the sea and others that live on land, marine biology classifies species based on t... Explore this topic

Climate change

Climate change is a significant and lasting change in the statistical distribution of weather patterns over periods ranging from decades to millions of years. It may be a change in average weather conditions, or in the distribution of weather around the average conditions. Cli... Explore this topic

Environment

Environmentalism is a broad philosophy, ideology and social movement regarding concerns for environmental conservation and improvement of the health of the environment, particularly as the measure for this health seeks to incorporate the concerns of non-human elements. Environ... Explore this topic

Futurity

Futurity is a nonprofit website that features the latest discoveries by scientists at top research universities in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia. Explore this topic

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Arctic Ocean

Phytoplankton

Sea ice

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