几周前，位于南极的乌克兰沃纳德斯基研究站的科学家醒来发现周围原本白茫茫的雪地被染成了令人震惊的血红色。

A few weeks ago, scientists at Ukraine's Vernadsky Research Base in Antarctica awoke to find their usually pristine¹ white surrounds drenched² in a shocking blood-red.

 

From the gory-looking images, you could be forgiven for wondering if there'd been some sort of horror-movie-style penguin³ massacre⁴. The good news is that the real cause is far less dramatic; unfortunately, it still has dire⁵ implications.

 

Marine⁶ ecologist Andrey Zotov from the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, captured these images while conducting research at the Antarctic station. For such an epic⁷ mess, the culprits behind this dramatic redecoration are incredibly tiny.

 

"Our scientists have identified them under a microscope as Chlamydomonas nivalis," said the National Antarctic Scientific Centre of Ukraine in a Facebook post.

 

These microscopic⁸ green algae⁹ (we'll get to why they look red in a moment), a type of single-cellular seaweed, are common in all icy and snowy regions of Earth, from the arctic to alpine¹⁰ regions.

 

They lie slumbering¹¹ during the brutal¹² winter, but once the sunlight warms enough to soften¹³ their crystallised world, the algae spring awake, making use of the meltwater and sunlight to rapidly bloom.

 

"The algae need liquid water in order to bloom," University of Leeds microbiologist Steffi Lutz told Gizmodo in 2016.

 

"[The algal blooms] contribute to climate change," the centre stated.

 

A study in 2016 showed that snow algal blooms can decrease the amount of light reflected from the snow (also know as albedo) by up to 13 percent across one melt season in the Arctic.

 

"This will invariably result in higher melt rates," the researchers wrote.

 

In 2017 environmental scientists calculated that microbial communities, which include C. nivalis, contributed to over a sixth of the snowmelt where they were present in Alaskan icefields. Their experiments showed that areas with more meltwater led to the growth of 50 percent more algae and places with more algae melted further.

 

This Antarctic summer has certainly seen a lot more meltwater than usual. Temperature records keep tumbling, leading to rapid melting at a scale previously¹⁴ only seen in the Northern Hemisphere.

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