But you can grow flowers there. As readers of this blog know, one of the Deming Lab’s major research directions is the microbiology of the sea ice surface – frost flowers, saline snow, and related features. Since the sea ice surface changes over time (collecting fresh snow, among other things) the best time for a microbiological investigation is when the ice is relatively young. Of course this presents many challenges. In addition to being thin – and therefore difficult to travel over – the formation of young sea ice is difficult to predict. An Arctic bay that hosted a beautiful field of frost flower during a given month one year might be open water, or 50 cm thick ice, the next!
In 2012 Jody Deming traveled to Daneborg in northeast Greenland to take part in an exploratory field effort with colleagues in the Arctic Science Partnership (ASP). Among other things they were trying to assess the potential for Daneborg as a long-term study site, and trying to develop methods for bringing together the tools and techniques of many different disciplines to better understand the sea ice ecosystem. There is a polynya (a place where the ice remains thin, or even non-existent, throughout the winter) in the fjord at Daneborg, an ideal situation for studying young sea ice. The team was thwarted however, by weather and ice conditions. Unable to reach the natural polynya they made their own (check out this post to see what happened when we tried this in Antarctica)!
This video from Aarhus University in Denmark has some great footage of the artificial “pond”, and a short interview with Jody, talking about some of her research interests.
Frostflower from Aarhus Universitet on Vimeo.
