By Devin Powell
Secret gardens may hide beneath floating slabs of ice in the Arctic. A pea soup of plantlike plankton has been uncovered that extends more than 100 kilometers under ice off Alaska’s coast.
The explosion of microscopic life, spotted last July, could cause problems for other critters in the Chukchi Sea, researchers report online June 7 in Science. Seasonal blooms this big traditionally happen later in the summer, and only in open waters exposed to the sun after ice melts.
“I’ve been in this field for almost 30 years now, and I would have said this was impossible,” says Kevin Arrigo, a biological oceanographer at Stanford University. “The assumption has always been that where you’ve got ice, nothing will grow in the water beneath it.”