外刊02 Glacier Blood? Watermelon Snow? Whatever It’s Called, Snow Shouldn’t Be So Red.-CSDN博客

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科学家们开始研究引起阿尔卑斯山雪藻爆发的物种，以更好地理解其成因和影响。这些藻类的增殖导致雪地变色，加速融化，可能预示着生态系统的改变。研究人员发现，不同类型的藻类在特定海拔生长，并可能与气候变化和人类活动有关。他们将继续研究以揭示这些红色警报背后的深层含义。

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Researchers are starting to investigate the species to investigate the species that drive alpine algal 海藻 blooms to better understand their causes and effects.

Winter through spring, the French Alps are wrapped in austere 庄严的、肃穆的 white snow. But as spring turns to summer, the stoic 坚固的 slopes 山坡 start to blush 泛红.

Parts of the snow take on bright colors: deep red, rusty 生锈的 orange, lemonade pink. Locals call this “sang (法语)血 de glacier,” or “glacier blood.” Visitors sometimes go with “watermelon snow”.

In reality, these blushes 泛红的 come from an embarrassment of algae藻类. In recent years, alpine habitats all over the world have experienced an uptick 小幅上涨 in snow algae blooms—dramatic, strangely hued 给……着色 aggregations 聚合体 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 organisms 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 光合作用的 prowess 超凡的技术/能力, 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 像浮渣一样的 freshwater blooms— or unsettling 令人不安的 glacier blood. The red-colored Sanguine 血红色的、充满信心的、乐观的 algae, shown under a microscope, taken from a sample of “watermelon snow.”

While it’s unclear exactly what spurs the blooms, the colors—often red, but sometimes green, gray or yellow—comes from pigments 色素 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 动态的 and hasten the shrinking of glaciers.

Inspired by increasing reports of the phenomenon, researchers at several alpine阿尔卑斯山 institutes decided to turn their attention from algae species in far-flung 遥远的 habitats to those “that grow next door,” said Eric Mare $\acute{e}$ chal, the head of a plant physiology 生理学 lab at Grenoble Alpes University and a leader of the project.

Because so many different types of algae can live and bloom in the mountains, the researchers began with a census in parts of the French Alps to find out what grows where. They took soil samples from five peaks, spread over various altitudes, and searched for algal DNA.

They found that many species tend to prefer particular elevations, and have most likely evolved to thrive in the conditions found there. One key genus类、属、种, fittingly 确切的、适合的 named Sanguine, grows only above 6500 feet.

The researchers also brought some species back to the lab to investigate their potential bloom triggers. Algae blooms occur naturally— the first written observation of glacier blood came from Aristotle 亚里士多德, who guessed that the snow had grown hairy red worms from lying around too long.

But human-generated factors can worsen such outbursts and make them more frequent.

Extreme weather, unseasonably warm temperatures and influxes of ……的大量涌入nutrients from agricultural and sewage 污水 runoff all play a role in freshwater and ocean algae blooms.

Many species of algae tend to prefer particular elevations and have most likely evolved to thrive in the conditions found there. Sanguine, for instance, grows only above 6500 feet.

To see if the same was true for glacier blood, the researchers subjected the algae to surpluses of nutrients, like nitrogen氮 and phosphorus 磷. While they have not found anything significant so far, they plan to continue this line of testing, Dr. Stewart said.

The limits of DNA sampling mean that even this study gives an incomplete picture of what’s living in and under the snow, said Heather Maughan , a microbiologist and research scholar at the Ronin Institute in New Jersey who was not involved.

Still，it revealed the “incredible diversity” of alpine algae— underscoring 强调 how little we know about them, as well as their potential to “serve as beacons 灯塔、指向标 of ecosystem change,” she said.

In the coming years, the researchers will keep track of how species distributions shift over time, which may shed light on the overall health of the ecosystem, Dr. Stewart said.

They will also try to establish whether temperature patterns correlate with blooms, and begin to compare species compositions in white versus colorful snow. Eventually, they hope to decipher 破译 the blood-red message.

“There’s so little that we know,” she said. “We need to dig deeper.”