The watermelon is one of the favorite fruits of the summer season and everyone wants a piece of it. However, there’s a different kind of “watermelon” that can be experienced only by going outside in snowy places.
Known as ‘watermelon snow,’ this phenomenon takes place the summer heat melts the snowy leftovers of winter. The pinkish nuance of the snow is caused by the sun, which leads to algal blooms that thrive in liquid water and freezing temperatures.
It’s a vicious cycle: firstly, the green organisms flourish under the hot sun, creating a sort of natural sunscreen to color the snowy slopes in pink and sometimes bright red. On the other hand, adding color darkens the snow, which leads to a quicker and faster paced meltdown.
According to Stefanie Lutz, a geobiologist working with the GFZ German Research Center for Geosciences and the lead study author, there’s a similarity between this phenomenon and what happens when we wear only black T-shirts instead of white ones.
Besides the fact that it feels much hotter than it is, this heat causes extra melting in the snow. Dr. Lutz and colleagues from several institutions, including the University of Leeds, have published a study on the matter in the journal Nature Communications.
As they analyzed the microbes that thrive in the summer snow, the international team noticed that even though these bacterial communities vary widely from place to place, they are an important factor in climate change.
So important, in fact, that the team has requested that watermelon snow be taken into consideration when experts create climate models to predict the downward direction of the environment.
Even though researchers are still trying to determine just how large the pink blooms can get, Dr. Lutz believes that they can spread all over the Arctic during summertime.
“Based on personal observations, a conservative estimate would be 50 percent of the snow surface on a glacier at the end of a melt season,” she wrote in an email. “But this can potentially be even higher.”
There’s a long list of factors that are turning the Arctic in a giant popsicle that’s rapidly melting down and the red snow algae is one of the many that’s still unaccounted for.
Image Source: Science Alert
