Recently Ukraine’s Ministry of Education and Science, shared a Facebook post of country’s Vernadsky Research station on an island just off the coast of Antarctica’s northernmost peninsula covered in “blood snow”, also called ‘watermelon snow’.
- It was red-pigmented, microscopic algae called Chlamydomonas nivalis, which thrives in freezing water as the ice melts during Antarctica’s record-breaking warm summer.
- Such algae grow well in freezing temperatures and liquid water.
- During the summer, when these green algae get a lot of sun, they start producing a natural sunscreen that paints the snow in shades of pink and red.
- In the winter, they lie dormant.
- The algae produce the tinted sunscreen to keep themselves warm. The report mentions that because the snow becomes darker from the tinge, it absorbs more heat, as a result of which it melts faster.
