Arctic Ice turning green, cause for worry; suggests new research

Arctic ice has drastically been of late turning green causing considerably high disruption in the Arctic food chain suggests new study.

Due to the deterioration of global climate due to excessive carbon emissions large blooms of phytoplankton are growing underneath the Arctic sea. However, that should clearly not be the case as the Phytoplankton ought not to be growing under the ice because most of the sunlight is reflected back into space being blocked from reaching deeper waters below by the ice.

But during the span of a few decades, Arctic ice has been getting gravely darker and thinner due to rising temperatures, permitting more and more sunlight to penetrate to the water below. Massive, dark pools of water on the ice surface, known as melt ponds have directed affected the reflectivity of the ice, worryingly decrease the rate of surface of reflection of sunlight.

The study was published in the world-renowned journal ‘Science Advances’, explaining how Arctic sea ice may be the culprit behind these phytoplankton growths.

"Our big question was, how much sunlight gets transmitted through the sea ice, both as a function of thickness, which has been decreasing, and the melt pond percentage, which has been increasing. What we found was that we went from a state where there wasn't any potential for plankton blooms to massive regions of the Arctic being susceptible to these types of growth," said first author Chris Horvat from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS).

Approximately, twenty years ago about three to four percent of the Arctic sea ice was thin enough to permit large colonies of plankton to bloom underneath it; however, researchers now found that nearly 30 percent of the ice-covered Arctic Ocean allows these blooms in summer months.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2017