Frost flowers in the news

Well, at least on another blog.  Thanks to Dr. Kim Martini, a physical oceanographer at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, for including linked photos from this blog in an article on frost flowers for Deep Sea News.  Dr. Martini’s article can be viewed here:

http://deepseanews.com/2012/11/the-icy-plumage-of-the-arctic/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

Dr. Martini’s article isn’t the only place where frost flowers have appeared in print recently.  Writing in the journal Polar Biology, Aslam and co-authors recently reported the results of what must have been a very challenging study of frost flowers grown in a laboratory tank – a much larger and more natural experimental setup than our early laboratory studies.  The Aslam study was particularly interesting in that natural seawater was used for the experiments, trucked to the lab in Germany in a food-grade commercial tanker from the North Sea.  The North Sea is far from being a polar sea, but the hope is that this water is similar enough to polar seawater to provide insight into how organic compounds in seawater are distributed in newly formed sea ice.

In agreement with our findings for laboratory and natural frost flowers Aslam and colleagues found that organic material and bacterial cells are concentrated near the surface of newly formed sea ice, in liquid brines and in frost flowers.

What we still don’t know is what, if anything, all these bacteria and organic compounds at the ice surface are doing.  Microbial metabolism decreases with decreasing temperature, and it is very cold at the surface of young sea ice, but not cold enough to make microbial activity here impossible.  And all that organic material at the ice surface can actually help bacteria survive there, by protecting them from high salt and freezing conditions.

The high concentration of organics also help overcome the poor efficiency of bacterial enzymes at low temperature.  The more organic substrate an enzyme has to interact with the less it needs to function efficiently to still get the job done.  Imagine that you’ve spilled m&ms all over your kitchen table and are trying to eat them as quick as you can.  Your fingers are very cold (you are trying to save on your heating bill) and you don’t have your normal dexterity.  The more m&ms on the table the more likely it is you will find ones that you can actually pick up.  Now fill your kitchen with saltwater the salinity of the Dead Sea, add a UV lamp bright enough to give you a sunburn, and repeat the experiment.  You are now experiencing the life of a marine bacterium at the surface of newly formed sea ice.