Red Alert As Arctic Snows Melt Faster

[marmar]

By Tim Radford / Climate News Network


LONDON—German scientists have fingered a new suspect in the great glacial melting mystery. The secret agent that may be darkening the summer snows and speeding up the absorption of solar rays is a family of microscopic, cold-loving organisms that tint the snow red.

The identification is not a simple matter, and no arrest is likely to be made soon. But researchers say that the cryophilic micro-eukaryotes can make the snow 13%—and sometimes up to 20%—less likely to reflect radiation back into space.

Stefanie Lutz, postdoctoral research associate at the German Research Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam, and colleagues report in Nature Communications that they sampled red-tinged summer snows from 40 sites on 16 glaciers in Greenland, Iceland, northern Sweden, and Norway’s Svalbard archipelago.

Cosmopolitan culprit

They then subjected their samples to genetic and microbiological analysis to identify what they describe as a “cosmopolitan” culprit. Despite the variation in geography, only about six kinds of algae—the biologist’s choice of word is taxa—colonised and coloured the snow in all the sites. ..................(more)

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/red_alert_as_arctic_snows_melt_faster_20160704