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| Wed, 20th May 2020 14:47:00 |
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Antarctic algal blooms: 'Green snow' mapped from space |
UK scientists have created the first wide-area maps of microscopic algae growing in coastal Antarctica.
Satellite observations were used to count nearly 1,700 patches where large blooms had turned snow cover green.
The team says the photosynthesising organisms are an important "sink" for pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.
They are also key actors in the cycling of nutrients in what is one the most remote regions on Earth.
"These are primary producers at the bottom of a food chain. If there are changes in the algae, it obviously has knock-on effects further up the food chain," explained study leader Dr Matt Davey from Cambridge University.
"And even though the numbers we're talking about are small on a global scale, on an Antarctic scale they're substantially important," the ecologist, who has since joined the Scottish Association for Marine Science in Oban, told BBC News.
Detecting the green algae from space was a tricky task.
While it's easy to spot the organisms' discolouration when walking in the snow on the ground, from orbit it becomes much harder to tease out the blooms' signal against what is a highly reflective surface.
Fortunately for the team, the European Union's Sentinel-2 spacecraft have high-fidelity detectors that are sensitive in just the right part of the light spectrum to make the observation.
The study mapped the Antarctic Peninsula, the finger of land which points up from the White Continent towards South America. The blooms are seen predominantly to be on the western side of this feature. Two-thirds were on the many islands that dot the coastline.
Totalled, the microscopic algae covered an area of almost 2 sq km. It means they're tying up roughly 500 tonnes of carbon a year. This is equivalent to the amount of carbon that would be emitted by about 875,000 average petrol car journeys in the UK, the team calculates.
Read original full article
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