Last summer, we travelled to the remote Arctic Hausgarten observatory area in the eastern Fram Strait (west of Svalbard, Norway) on a research ship. The samples we collected there included ice cores, sea water and ice algae from large packs of floating ice called ice floes. These form 1–2 metre thick “plates” of sea ice across the Arctic Ocean, some of which melt over the summer period.
Algae grow on the underside of these ice floes. Melosira arctica – nicknamed “snot” due to its sticky, slimy and green nature – is one of the major algae species in the Arctic Ocean. It is an essential organism both in the Arctic food web and for marine life overall.
These ice algae provide nutrition for plankton and various other marine organisms in the Arctic. The algae also act as a conveyor belt of food for the organisms that live on the sea floor. As the ice melts, the algae detach and sink to the bottom where they are eaten by animals such as sea cucumbers and brittlestars.
