The waters of Antarctica under the ice ceiling are home to amazing life forms combined into unique ecosystems. A group of scientists from Tasmania and New Zealand has been filming the beauty of the Antarctic living world for two seasons.
Researchers have used modern under-ice surveillance systems to track the size and health of microcommunities that are a key part of the Antarctic food chain. The experiment with different light turned out to be especially interesting.
To do this, scientists put multi-colored plexiglass plates with an area of 5 square meters on the surface of the ice. m each, which created fundamentally new conditions for the existence of subglacial microcommunities. In this way, people tried to simulate the future, which most likely consists in a decrease in the thickness of the Antarctic ice. It turned out that changing the light also changes the structure, physiological status and number of algal communities under each multi-colored panel.
This work is organized within the framework of a large international project “Six Priorities for Antarctic Science”. Researchers must collect data about Antarctica’s nature as carefully as possible, using autonomous vehicles and leaving miniature sensors in the field that will transmit data for months or even years.
The technology used by the scientists creates images with extremely high resolution that surpasses the capabilities of the human eye. Such detailing makes it possible to assess the size of microcommunities and their physiological conditions. One of the main tasks of the group is to assess the impact of light as the main source of life on these microcommunities.
A byproduct of the work was video recordings that showed the amazing beauty of polar life.
По материалам статьи «Mapping the in Situ Microspatial Distribution of Ice Algal Biomass through Hyperspectral Imaging of Sea-ice Cores»; Emiliano Cimoli, Vanessa Lucieer, Klaus M. Meiners, Arjun Chennu, Katerina Castrisios, Ken G. Ryan, Lars Chresten Lund-Hansen, Andrew Martin, Fraser Kennedy, Arko Lucieer; журнал Scientific Reports
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