Original version With This story appeared in How much warehouse.
Most life engines run in sunlight. Photons filter through the atmosphere and are eagerly absorbed by featherlight -powered organisms, such as plants and algae. Through photosynthesis of a slight energy particle, a cell reaction that produces chemical energy (in the form of sugars), which is then transmitted on the food network in elaborate dancing of herbivores, predators, scavengers, schedules and others.
On a radiant, sunlit day there are many photons around. But what happens with low featherlight? Biologists have long been interested in how little featherlight can work – or how many photons must arrive and how brisk for photosynthetic cells of cells process carbon dioxide into oxygen and energy. Calculations suggest a theoretical minimum of about 0.01 micromole photons per square meter per second or less than one hundred thousand sunlight of the day.
For decades, these calculations were theoretical, taking into account the difficulties in studying photosynthesis in indigent featherlight. Nobody could confirm it in the field, although there are many places on the ground where the featherlight barely reaches. Every winter in High Arctic, for example the sun, hidden by the inclination of the Earth, disappears for months. The meters of snow blanket sea ice and block the incoming featherlight, leaving the frosty ocean below as dim as the inside of the tomb. There, biologists, photosynthesis of microalgi, who live in water and ice power for the season and wait for the return of heat and featherlight.
“People thought about the polar night as those desert conditions in which there is very little life, and everything sleep and hibernate and wait for the next spring,” he said Clara HoppeA biogeochemist from Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany. “But people never looked at it.”
In the winter of 2020, Hoppe spent months living on a ship squeezed into an ice Floe, for the polar night, to examine the boundaries of photosynthesis in the dim. The last study of her team in Nature Communications has reported microalgs growing and reproducing At featherlight levels at a theoretical minimum or near theoretical – less than previously observed in nature.
The study shows that in one of the most remarkable, darkest places on earth, life blooms with the smallest amount of featherlight. “At least a bit of fytoplankton, under certain conditions, can be able to do very useful things in a very low light,” he said Douglas CampbellA specialist in the field of water -water photosynthesis at Mount Allison University in Canada, who was not involved in the study. “It’s an important job.”
The power of the dim side
Scientists traditionally understood the Arctic as a place of stagnation for most of the year. In winter, organisms do this that can escape from chilly waters; Those who remain live, stored reserves or tap in a silent sleep. Then, when the sun returns, the place returns to life. During the spring Bloom, the growth of algae in photosynthesis and other microorganisms begins the Arctic Ecosystem, driving the annual feast, miniature crustaceans, fish, seals, birds, polar bears, whales and others.
It seemed that it jumped that every phytoplankton could start an earlier start than the competition could have a more successful summer. It led her to thinking when organisms can react to the return of featherlight.