Baku, June 9 (AZERTAC). A team of researchers, including scientists from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), discovered a massive bloom of phytoplankton beneath ice-covered Arctic waters. Until now, sea ice was thought to block sunlight and limit the growth of microscopic marine plants living under the ice. The amount of phytoplankton growing in this under-ice bloom was four times greater than the amount found in neighboring ice-free waters. The bloom extended laterally more than 100 kilometers (62 miles) underneath the ice pack, where ocean and ice physics combined to create a phenomenon that scientists had never seen before.

"Way more production is happening under the ice than we previously thought, in a manner that`s very different than we expected," said WHOI biologist Sam Laney, who was part of the multi-institutional team led by Kevin Arrigo of Stanford University. Just as a rainstorm in the desert can cause the landscape to explode with wildflowers, this research shows that events like pooling melt water can happen on very short timescales in the Arctic yet have major effects on the ecosystem.

Researchers expected that, as in years past, the waters beneath the ice would have minimal amounts of chlorophyll -- the fluorescing hallmark of photosynthetic marine plants. Instead, they observed the opposite. "Although the under-ice light field was less intense than in ice-free waters, it was sufficient to support the blooms of under-ice phytoplankton, which grew twice as fast at low light as their open ocean counterparts," the study notes. The ship conducted transects into the ice pack to determine how far and deep the bloom extended. Measurements of biomass showed the largest part of the bloom occurred far away from the open ocean, under thick ice and close to water upwelling at the continental shelf break, where the shallow coastal shelf plunges steeply into deeper water.

Another member of the ICESCAPE team, WHOI physical oceanographer Bob Pickart showed that easterly winds churned out by monster storm systems along the Aleutian Islands can reverse the current along the shelf break. The change in circulation drives cold, nutrient-rich water up from the abyss and refreshes the supply of nutrients available to phytoplankton growing near the surface.