A team of scientists, led by Stanford’s Kevin Arrigo, broke through some of the Arctic ice last July as part of the NASA ICESCAPE mission and found the complete opposite—abundant life!

“If someone had asked me before the expedition whether we would see under-ice blooms, I would have told them it was impossible,” says Arrigo. “This discovery was a complete surprise.”

The researchers discovered an abundance of phytoplankton—microscopic life that forms the base of the marine food chain. Phytoplankton require sunlight for photosynthesis, just like plants. And sunlight has a tough time penetrating thick sea ice.

But that thick sea ice is changing. Not only are warmer temperatures thinning the ice, but as the ice melts in summer, it forms pools of water that act like transient skylights and magnifying lenses. These pools focus sunlight through the ice and into the ocean, where currents steer nutrient-rich deep waters up toward the surface. Phytoplankton under the ice evolved to take advantage of this narrow window of light and nutrients.

The phytoplankton displayed extreme activity, doubling in number more than once a day. Blooms in open waters grow at a much slower rate, doubling in two to three days. These growth rates are among the highest ever measured for polar waters. Researchers estimate that phytoplankton production under the ice in parts of the Arctic could be up to 10 times higher than in the nearby open ocean.

The phytoplankton bloom discovered by Arrigo and his colleagues in the Chukchi Sea (just north of Alaska) extends tens of meters deep in spots and about 100 kilometers (62 miles) across.

“At this point we don’t know whether these rich phytoplankton blooms have been happening in the Arctic for a long time and we just haven’t observed them before,” Arrigo says. “These blooms could become more widespread in the future, however, if the Arctic sea ice cover continues to thin.”

The discovery of these previously unknown under-ice blooms could have serious implications for the broader Arctic ecosystem, including migratory species such as whales and birds. Phytoplankton are eaten by small ocean animals, which are eaten by larger fish and ocean animals.

“It could make it harder and harder for migratory species to time their life cycles to be in the Arctic when the bloom is at its peak,” Arrigo says. “If their food supply is coming earlier, they might be missing the boat.”

The research is published this week in Science.

Image: NASA

Presenting at the National Meeting of the American Chemical Society, MIT’s Daniel Nocera, PhD, announced the first practical artificial leaf.

“A practical artificial leaf has been one of the Holy Grails of science for decades,” said Dr. Nocera, who led the research team. “We believe we have done it. The artificial leaf shows particular promise as an inexpensive source of electricity for homes of the poor in developing countries. Our goal is to make each home its own power station,” he said. “One can envision villages in India and Africa not long from now purchasing an affordable basic power system based on this technology.”

About the shape of a poker card but thinner, the device is fashioned from silicon, electronics and catalysts, substances that accelerate chemical reactions that otherwise would not occur, or would run slowly. Placed in a single gallon of water in bright sunlight, the device could produce enough electricity to supply a house in a developing country with electricity for a day. It does so by splitting water into its two components, hydrogen and oxygen. These two gases would then be stored in an electricity-producing fuel cell located either on top of the house or beside it.

Right now, the artificial leaf is about 10 times more efficient at carrying out photosynthesis than a natural leaf. However, Nocera is optimistic that he can boost the efficiency of the artificial leaf much higher in the future.

And that’s not all. Science Now reports:

The new catalyst also appears highly stable. Nocera says his team has been operating the device for a week, using water from the nearby Charles River in Cambridge, without any drop in efficiency. The next step is to find out whether the device works equally well in seawater. If so, it could dramatically lower the cost of producing hydrogen fuel.

Use in the real world is not so far in the future, according to Discover’s 80beats blog:

Tata Group, an Indian conglomerate, plans on creating a power plant based on this research within the next year and a half.

“Nature is powered by photosynthesis, and I think that the future world will be powered by photosynthesis as well in the form of this artificial leaf,” said Nocera.

Deal me in!

Image courtesy of Wikimedia

Now scientists have discovered an insect that might also convert the sun’s energy for fuel. Publishing in the journal Naturwissenschaften, the researchers describe the process by which the Oriental hornet uses its exoskeleton to absorb sunlight.

Since the 1990s, scientists noticed that these insects were different. They are most active during the hottest, brightest part of the day, unlike most wasps. Around that time, scientists also discovered that the Oriental hornet could actually produce voltage along its exoskeleton.

According to the PLoS Blog The Gleaming Retort, in 2009, the same scientists:

…showed that, unexpectedly, a variety of important metabolic activities seem to center on the yellow abdominal stripes of the Oriental hornets rather than around the fat bodies that normally handle them in insects. (Think about what this means: if the same arrangement applied to humans, our skin would be doing the job of our livers.)

Remember, beauty is not always only skin deep. The current research dug deeper into the exoskeleton. Looking at the brown and yellow areas of the hornet, the scientists went all the way down to the nano-level of its exoskeleton. They found that the yellow area would scatter the light, not reflect it, allowing it to penetrate into the deep layers of the exoskeleton. Essentially, the yellow areas were trapping the sunlight.

With the trapped sunlight, the yellow pigment, Xanthopterin, then works to use it. According to lead author Marian Plotkin, in BBC News:

“Xanthopterin works as a light harvesting molecule transforming light into electrical energy.”

So do these Oriental hornets use photsynthesis to power their movements? According to Discover’s Discoblog, there’s not yet enough evidence

… but they’re working on it.

Image by MattiPaavola/Wikimedia Commons

The chlorophyll was found in cyanobacteria that live on stramatolites in Australia’s Shark Bay. According to New Scientist,

Min Chen of the University of Sydney in Australia, and her colleagues, went looking for interesting chlorophyll in the stromatolites there because the water in which they live – and the trapped sediment that bulks them out – filter out much of the visible light reaching the stromatolitic cyanobacteria. The team suspected that the cyanobacteria might therefore be better-than-average at absorbing the infrared radiation that makes it through.

The new chlorophyll can essentially allow cyanobacteria living deep within stromatolites to photosynthesise using low-energy infrared light. And, Chen says in Scientific American,

“That means that organisms that have this chlorophyll inside can extend their photosynthetic range for maximum use of solar energy.”

This is good news for solar cells. New Scientist reports that:

Because over half of the light from the sun comes in at infrared wavelengths, the makers of photovoltaic panels have been working on ways to extend the section of the spectrum that solar cells can absorb to beyond red.

Maybe this chlorophyll could hold the key to extending that range for solar cells.

There was even more good news for efficient solar energy this week. Scientists are developing self-cleaning solar panels, based on NASA Mars and Moon rovers, to clean the dust off of the panels. According to the BBC,

Dust deposits can reduce the efficiency of electricity generating solar panels by as much as 80%.

This will allow solar to go in dry deserts and other dusty places. Go, Solar! (or Go Solar!)