The Bottom of the Arctic Is Blooming

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https://eos.org/articles/the-bottom-of-the-arctic-is-blooming

By Fanni Daniella Szakal, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Every year in the spring, the Arctic Ocean blooms ...with microscopic algae. After the bloom has exhausted the nutrients on the surface, these plankton sink to the seafloor and, without light, die or remain in a stable state. At least, that was what we thought. A new study in Global Change Biology, however, uncovered that in the summer, phytoplankton could bloom at the bottom of the Arctic. ...Takuhei Shiozaki, coauthor of the study ...and his colleagues found that instead of being in a stable state with low productivity, algae in water samples from the seafloor showed high primary production, indicating a bloom. ...The effects of climate change are especially severe in the Arctic, causing the region to warm at a rate nearly 4 times as fast as the rest of the planet. Many marine areas that used to be covered by ice year-round are now ice-free in the summer. Shiozaki and his team speculated that this lack of ice, coupled with seasonally transparent water and increases in the amount of solar radiation absorbed (irradiance), allows sunlight to reach the bottom of the ocean in shallow areas, triggering phytoplankton blooms. ...If there is indeed primary production going on at the bottom of the ocean, the implications could be far-reaching. As phytoplankton form the basis of the food web in the Arctic, bottom blooms could alter the ecosystem ...for example, previously documented algal blooms indirectly contributed to increases in bowhead whale populations. The hidden blooms could also have an impact on the carbon cycle, as phytoplankton remove carbon from the environment during photosynthesis.... 

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