Dec. 19, 2016
Polar plankton communities are among the most productive, seasonally-dynamic, and rapidly-changing ecosystems in the global ocean. A study, coauthored by Jorge Sarmiento and published recently in Nature Geoscience, uses space-borne Light Detection and Ranging (lidar) observations to overcome the limitations of historical passive sensors and report a decade of uninterrupted polar phytoplankton biomass cycles.