Going Green

0:00Exploring Science in the Sea. Big swaths of the Southern Ocean have been going green. Summertime blooms of the tiny plant-like organisms known as phytoplankton are covering a much larger area. That makes the ocean look greener, and that could be kicking off big changes in the life around Antarctica. The trend started in 2016 and 17. Before then, the sea ice around Antarctica had been

0:31pretty stable for years, but it decreased dramatically, disappearing across an area as big as Texas and New Mexico combined. And the ice has been dwindling ever since. A lost senior round. To understand how that's affected life in the Southern Ocean, researchers looked at satellite photos. They studied the color of the ocean surface. Regions with more phytoplankton looked greener. On average, almost 70% of the study region showed a significant increase in summer

1:02phytoplankton over the past decade. The researchers compared those findings to the numbers of tiny animals found in the water, krill and salps. Krill look like shrimp, and they're a major food source for whales, fish, and other organisms. Salps have jelly-like bodies, and they're not a major food source for any big ocean predators. The change in phytoplankton appears to be favoring the salps. They seem to like the regions with less ice and extra phytoplankton more than the krill

1:33do. But any long-term change in the balance between salps and krill could impact the entire ecosystem. A green conundrum in the Antarctic. Science in the Sea is available as a weekly podcast at scienceinthesea.org. I'm Holly Brawley.