The surprising reason why Arctic warming could be worse than previously thought
▻http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/04/21/the-surprising-reason-why-arctic-warming-could-be-worse-than-previou
For the most part, we humans can live our lives entirely untroubled by the doings of phytoplankton.
These tiny, largely single-celled marine organisms are, basically, little photosynthesis machines — they contain chlorophyll and process sunlight to create energy. It might sound relatively dull — but according to new research, this simple lifestyle could have major climate change ramifications.
The new study, just out in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, finds that as the Arctic Ocean warms and loses its sea ice cover, populations of phytoplankton will boom. This will, in turn, further amplify warming in a region that’s already heating up twice as fast as the rest of the planet.
The reason is that phytoplankton, when they are more numerous, lead to a warmer upper layer of the ocean, because more radiation from the sun is trapped in that layer. Phytoplankton are thus changing the “physical property of the ocean,” says lead study author Jong-Yeon Park of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany.