Microalgae are tiny organisms that convert energy from sunlight into fuel. The arctic ecosystem depends on them. In springtime, the algae bloom brilliant shades of green and draw tiny crustaceans, fish, birds and more to arctic waters. But what happens in wintertime, when the sun goes down and darkness reins for months? In the depths of the polar night, biogeochemist Clara Hoppe has found evidence that some microalgae are still ready to photosynthesize. Today on the show: how tiny microalgae limbo for their lives and come out more powerful than scientists ever imagined. Want to hear more stories of nature pushing the boundaries of what scientists previously thought possible? Let us know by emailing [email protected]!Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
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You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, short ravers, Emily Kwong here. And today we are headed north to Norway, the land of the midnight sun.
The sky looks like cotton candy the whole day because you have a sunrise that doesn't stop. It's just a full day of sunrise or sunset.
Because Earth rotates on a tilt, there is a period of time during the summer where the North Pole always faces the sun, creating a polar day or perpetual sunlight. But in exchange, there's also a period of time during the winter of perpetual darkness. That's called the polar night.
So the polar night is the period between the last sunset in fall and the first sunset in spring, during which the sun never rises in the Arctic for several months.
This is Clara Hopper. She's a biogeochemist at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany. But a lot of her fieldwork is based here, around the Arctic Circle. During the polar night, she says, it's like everything is in grayscale.
When it's really dark, it's really a black and white world, I would say, where you see some gray shades of things and you see stars and the moon. It's really quiet here. There's wind, there's instrument noise, there's ship sounds and snowmobiles, but like natural sounds, it's probably mostly the wind and the snow moving. It's a very big, dark world.
And because you're only seeing what you see with your little headlamp, you see very, very little and you feel very small.
In the winter of 2020, Clara embarked on an expedition into the heart of the polar night to study microalgae, these photosynthesizing microorganisms that are super small and delicate.
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