Ice Algae

    Have you ever been to the North pole? Probably not, but today I want to share something pretty fascinating that I found out about sea ice. If you theoretically were on a boat in the Arctic or Antarctic, and decide to go scuba diving under a sheet of ice, you might find gooey looking "stuff" growing under the ice. Meet ice algae, a weird thing that grows on ice. 

If you were in a polar ocean, you would notice that there is no land but there is a lot of ice. This is excactly what ice algae thought, well not really, but you get the point. Ice algae needs a place to anchor near the sunlight but in a polar ocean it doesn't have that, so it anchors under ice. Ice algae takes advantage of the fact that there is light under the ice, because it's basically water, and absorbs sunlight as well as  any organic matter that is floating around. Ice algae is important to the ecosystem because it maximizes the extra space of all the ice in a polar ocean meaning more food for everyone. Here's what it looks like:

Pretty creepy, right?