Authors Larry Rose, Science Teacher, TEA Associate, Pleasanton Middle School, Pleasanton, California Mail to Larry . Background Students can explore the journals of TEA Besse Dawson who worked on the poor areal development of the ice pack during the El Nino year of 1997-98, and how this negatively affected the development of the phytoplankton in Antarctic seas. At high latitudes, phytoplankton are frozen in the ice and survive in that fashion. Icebreakers churning through pack ice leave a wake of brown ice behind them, the brown color due to masses of phytoplankton embedded in the ice. If they are not frozen into the pack ice they sink and die.
Phytoplankton are the base of the food chain in the oceans.
The El Nino year's poor development of sea ice bodes poorly for the krill population and thus for the populations of krill-eating penguins and cetaceans and all throughout the food chain. Phytoplankton which depend on the development of the pack ice for their survival also, perhaps, are the most efficient way that nature removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Student research on the carbon cycle, the greenhouse effect and global warming and its intimate relationship with pack ice development should provide your students with many avenues for research into the global ecological importance of polar studies. Please review this activity.