A large fraction of the Ocean in the Arctic is covered by ice in the winter. Very little light penetrates under the thick ice recovered by snow during the long polar night. Still phytoplankton, tiny unicellular algae a few 1/1000th of millimeters (1/1000 mm is called a micron) in size and which is at the base of arctic marine food chains, is present in these cold and dark waters.
Continue reading After the long winter night, the sudden brightness
Following our last post about the interactive and multimedia project In the wake of an ice-breaker in the Arctic, associated to the AOA educative website, the scientific team is setting up an original and innovative teaching device intended for primary schoolstudents, to allow them to discover the Arctic region, the scientific and non-scientific crew, as well as the challenges of the undertaking research in the area. Continue reading First Rendez-vous with children: Be curious about the ice-breaker!
One of the major habitats GreenEdge researchers are studying is the sea-ice. We are interested in its optical, physical and chemical features, as well as the life it supports. As such, one of the essential activities at the ice camp is the ice coring. We actually spend the full morning coring the entire ice thickness (which currently varies from 1.15 m to 1.50 m at the study site) with different cores (14.5 and 9 cm diameters) for different purposes, i.e. measurement of temperature and salinity gradients, nutrient content, chlorophyll a biomass, spectral properties, microbial genetic diversity, etc.
