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
One of the particularities of being in Qikiqtarjuaq, and evidently of being beyond the polar circle, is the time and more precisely: the timing.
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.
