. The Eastern Bering Sea Shelf : oceanography and resources / edited by Donald W. Hood and John A. Calder. Oceanography Bering 776 Interaction of ice and biota continues until breakup. In the true Arctic, growth in the ice occurred well ahead of the maximum growth in the water column, and the two production periods appeared to be unrelated (Homer and Alex- ander 1972). The conditions there, however, were vastly different, and certainly did not represent, as the area under study here does, a clear ice-edge situation. Our work at the ice edge has shown considerable variation in the primary
. The Eastern Bering Sea Shelf : oceanography and resources / edited by Donald W. Hood and John A. Calder. Oceanography Bering 776 Interaction of ice and biota continues until breakup. In the true Arctic, growth in the ice occurred well ahead of the maximum growth in the water column, and the two production periods appeared to be unrelated (Homer and Alex- ander 1972). The conditions there, however, were vastly different, and certainly did not represent, as the area under study here does, a clear ice-edge situation. Our work at the ice edge has shown considerable variation in the primary productivity and algal popu- lations associated with ice. Three ice stations occu- pied during the 1977 spring period from the Surveyor showed high carbon assimilation rates, although the nature of the ice and the algal populations was not uniform. Pockets of dense algae occurred apparently at random in disrupted, broken layers of sediment and ice. Although quantitative information was not obtained here, it is clear that this population has a significant effect on the surrounding environment. One way of measuring primary productivity in the ice layer is to collect brash ice, which appears reddish-brown in color because of living cells, to allow it to melt at surface seawater temperature, and then to carry out a carbon-14 primary produc- tivity measurement on this material under surface seawater light and temperature conditions. This method yields results which approximate the activity of cells released from the ice into surface seawater. The results of one such experiment on material collected from three stations are shown in Table 45-2. Although this experiment does not approximate normal dispersion of the cells into seawater, and therefore presents an environment of unrealistically low salinity for the cells, it does suggest a significant influx of active cells into the seawater at the ice edge. Counts of total cells in this material ranged from 10' to lOVl- An experiment in
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