One Year In Ice City: A Look Inside The World’s Largest Arctic Expedition
Bowman, one of about
90 Americans on the mission, was in the third wave of researchers to arrive at
the ice camp. His research focuses on microscopic organisms that live in the
upper regions of the ocean. The Amazon rainforest may be known as the lungs of
the planet, he said, taking in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and breathing
out oxygen, but about half of the photosynthesis that takes place on Earth is
being carried out by single-celled phytoplankton at the ocean’s surface.
Only a fraction of
that is happening in the polar North, but it’s an important fraction that
scientists know very little about. From their position at the bottom of the
food chain, “these phytoplankton communities really drive the dynamics of the
ecosystem ... but we don’t have a baseline understanding of what that ecosystem
is doing,” Bowman said.
MOSAiC is giving
researchers their first look at how the process changes as the ice melts and
freezes, in a part of the Earth where the sun - the very engine of
photosynthesis - doesn’t rise for months at a time. One of the things Bowman
wanted to learn is how much carbon dioxide is being taken in by
photosynthesizing phytoplankton versus how much ends up being released back
into the air at different times - an equation that determines the net amount of
carbon removed from the atmosphere and sequestered in the system....
