Glacier Blood? Watermelon Snow? Whatever It's Called, Snow Shouldn't Be So Red. (nytimes.com) 55
Winter through spring, the French Alps are wrapped in austere white snow. But as spring turns to summer, the stoic slopes start to blush. Parts of the snow take on bright colors: deep red, rusty orange, lemonade pink. Locals call this "sang de glacier," or "glacier blood." Visitors sometimes go with "watermelon snow." From a report: In reality, these blushes come from an embarrassment of algae. In recent years, alpine habitats all over the world have experienced an uptick in snow algae blooms -- dramatic, strangely hued aggregations of these normally invisible creatures. While snow algae blooms are poorly understood, that they are happening is probably not a good sign. Researchers have begun surveying the algae of the Alps to better grasp what species live there, how they survive and what might be pushing them over the bleeding edge. Some of their initial findings were published this week in Frontiers in Plant Science.
Tiny yet powerful, the plantlike bacteria we call algae are "the basis of all ecosystems," said Adeline Stewart, an author of the study who worked on it as a doctoral student at Grenoble Alpes University in France. Thanks to their photosynthetic prowess, algae produce a large amount of the world's oxygen, and form the foundation of most food webs. But they sometimes overdo it, multiplying until they throw things out of balance. This can cause toxic red tides, scummy freshwater blooms -- or unsettling glacier blood. While it's unclear exactly what spurs the blooms, the color -- often red, but sometimes green, gray or yellow -- comes from pigments and other molecules that the snow algae use to protect themselves from ultraviolet light. These hues absorb more sunlight, causing the underlying snow to melt more quickly. This can change ecosystem dynamics and hasten the shrinking of glaciers.
Tiny yet powerful, the plantlike bacteria we call algae are "the basis of all ecosystems," said Adeline Stewart, an author of the study who worked on it as a doctoral student at Grenoble Alpes University in France. Thanks to their photosynthetic prowess, algae produce a large amount of the world's oxygen, and form the foundation of most food webs. But they sometimes overdo it, multiplying until they throw things out of balance. This can cause toxic red tides, scummy freshwater blooms -- or unsettling glacier blood. While it's unclear exactly what spurs the blooms, the color -- often red, but sometimes green, gray or yellow -- comes from pigments and other molecules that the snow algae use to protect themselves from ultraviolet light. These hues absorb more sunlight, causing the underlying snow to melt more quickly. This can change ecosystem dynamics and hasten the shrinking of glaciers.
Re:Natural phenomenon (Score:5, Informative)
Please, please don't try to tie this to global warming then use it to threaten human or animal extinction. I'm so fucking sick of it.
It is tied to global warming which does threaten human and animal extinction. Perhaps you should go to the beach and bury your head in the sand with all the other wingnuts if reality is too much for you to handle?
Algae won't go extinct (Score:2, Insightful)
Algae are rather robust and unlike humanity to whom they are necessary will thrive at any level of AGW.
Human extinction would be good news because humans are stupid savage creatures, not because they threaten other species. Either God does shitty work or there is no Sky Fairie and we're just another random turd shat from the void.
Re:Natural phenomenon (Score:5, Insightful)
You know the best definition of "reality" I've ever heard ?
"Reality is the set of all things that you can't escape".
It doesn't matter if you're "fucking sick of it". Someday, somehow, you're going to have to deal with it.
Re:Natural phenomenon (Score:4, Informative)
You know the best definition of "reality" I've ever heard ? "Reality is the set of all things that you can't escape".
Which is variant of the Philip K. Dick quote, "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." (from I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon).
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Their existence as meme complexes is part of reality -- the evidence for the existence of the religions is pretty strong. The things to which those memes refer (i.e. the things the religions believe in) are the things that may or may not count as reality (subject to evidence). It's the difference between the pointer value and the data at the address. The address definitely exists even if it is out of range of existing memory size. :-)
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That's clearly NERV messing around with massive space alien god things they shouldn't.
Algae are not bacteria (Score:5, Informative)
From TFS:
the plantlike bacteria we call algae
Algae are not bacteria. They are eucaryotes like humans are.
Watermelon snow [wikipedia.org] is caused by eukaryotic algae, not cyanobacteria.
It's also not embarrassing (Score:1)
The idiom "embarrassment of riches" works because one might be somewhat embarrassed when possessing an overabundance of money or other resources. I can't imagine someone being embarrassed by an overabundance of algae.
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The idiom "embarrassment of riches" works because one might be somewhat embarrassed when possessing an overabundance of money or other resources.
I saw a guy with a truckload of plywood the other day; he didn't look embarrassed at all.
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Yeah, but that's because it was not morning.
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Sure, I can. Somebody like a sewage plant operator, because an excess around his discharge point means that he fucked up.
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Ever find out how fertilizer is made?
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Every time my pool turns green, I'm embarrassed by my "overabundance of algae". Usually it's because I forgot to clean the filter.
Amazing coincidence (Score:5, Informative)
Just yesterday I was hiking up a peak here in Idaho and was noticing the red snow on the snow banks. It is more than I have seen before... We were debating if it was a fungi or bacteria... but now I know it is an algae.
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Non-Paywalled Version (Score:5, Informative)
Non-paywalled version of article can be found here: https://news.yahoo.com/glacier-blood-watermelon-snow-whatever-152637317.html [yahoo.com]
so... in summary (Score:1)
The planet is fine, ecosystems are evolving into new areas, oxygen is being generated; it's just that It fucks up our selfies and local tourism.
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The planet is fine but the people are fucked. Glacier blood is accidentally a very apt nickname.
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it smacks hyperbole to me.
To the contrary (Score:2)
it's just that It fucks up our selfies and local tourism.
If red snow is messing with tourism you just aren't marketing it right; red snow looks super awesome on Instagram backdrops.
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I live up where the MSL isn't a worry, oxygen is. Go team algae!
"Snow Shouldn't Be So Red" says who? (Score:1)
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says who ?
People who know a lot more, and are a lot smarter, than you.
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Most journalists are smart when compared to the vast majority of Internet population. Journalists spend their days researching the topics that they write about, unlike most commenters.
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According to whom? (Score:3, Insightful)
Fire residue (Score:5, Insightful)
Two factors which contribute to algal blooms in liquid bodies of water may partially responsible. The first is artificial fertilizer. However, I doubt this is being applied to alpine slopes. Another is runoff from burnt vegetarian - which provides a great deal of phosphorous which is often the limiting factor on algal growth. This is far more likely. Another possibility is that a new species has evolved which purposely darkens the snow so that it can be warmed by sunlight and provide a better growing environment.
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Another is runoff from burnt vegetarian - which provides a great deal of phosphorous which is often the limiting factor on algal growth. This is far more likely.
When California burns, the French Alps bleed.
California fires are more than hot enough to throw ash high enough into the atmosphere to circle the globe. And the algae feast.
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Huge tracts of Siberian forests have also burned the last couple of years.
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Australia too.
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Wonder if they're seeing glacier blood in Antarctica. There isn't a whole lot of atmospheric interchange between the northern and southern hemispheres, but Australia and the Amazon would certainly contribute ash to Antarctic snowfalls.
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runoff from burnt vegetarian
When will people learn, cooking meat past medium ruins it
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Algae evolved to live on snow long before there were multicellular animals, this is not something new. What's new is that the amount of them living on snow is unprecedented in our (rather short) history. Something is providing them food that they didn't used to get speculation higher in the thread is that it could be ash from the Californian and Siberian wildfires, which were also unprecedented.
FFS Slashdot ban this stupid paywall shit. (Score:3)
Whatever it's called we can't fucking read it.
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Thankyou for doing the editor's job for them, though you shouldn't have to.
The old saying of "I only come here for the comments rings truer now than ever".
Overdo? (Score:2)
It seems that algae are doing exactly what they evolved to do. Likely "overdoing" it is a beneficial trait for the algae in some cases. Perhaps there are situations where "overpopulation" results in enough surviving algae for the next generation to prosper in a particular area after being subjected to the some environmental stress.
The algae aren't hurt when they turn the tides or snow red and it doing so doesn't result in enough disruption in the environment to destroy future gen
Paywall Bypass Link (Score:1)
All over the Rocky Mountains too (Score:1)
Re: All over the Rocky Mountains too (Score:1)
IMPORTANT (Score:2)
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Given the comments I read online, I'm less convinced of that theory. :-)