- This floating microscopic organism
looks like a spinning top and can be found in our ocean.
How does it affect you?
The answer may surprise you.
Find out next on "Real World."
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Earth is about 71% water.
And almost anywhere there's water,
there's phytoplankton,
tiny but mighty organisms that play a critical role
in our planet's ecosystem.
NASA's PACE mission helps us understand
phytoplankton's impact on the Earth's oceans,
land, and atmosphere.
Let's start with the science.
What are phytoplankton?
And what role do phytoplankton play within Earth's systems?
- So phytoplankton are a large group of living organisms
that we can find in ocean and, we say, other aquatic bodies.
So like, lakes and rivers.
If I would compare the smallest one
that is around 0.3 micrometers
to the largest one
that can go sometimes up to 1 millimeter,
you can see that that's a really big range.
So that's as comparing a small fish to the size of Manhattan.
The thing that makes them plant-like is that they have
this pigment that allows them to capture the sunlight
and capture a little bit of carbon dioxide
that is in the atmosphere,
and convert that into the--
to sugars that now feed marine food web.
And while they're doing that, they produce oxygen.
They actually produce 50% of the oxygen on Earth.
So if you think about it,
they're like plant-like things in the ocean.
They're really, really important because they produce oxygen,
they feed the oceanic food web, and they also control
the flow of carbon by capturing this carbon dioxide
and moving into the sugars.
- Who knew that something so small could be so useful?
Are all plankton helpful?
- So phytoplankton as a group are really good
because they produce oxygen, they feed the marine food web,
and they control the flow of the carbon.
But some phytoplankton have capabilities
of producing toxins.
And when there's lots of them growing these toxins,
which are pretty much poisons,
they get accumulated through that food web
and ultimately has a bad effect on us humans--
we're the top predators--
or other top predators in the ocean,
so think about seabirds, dolphins and whales.
That high diversity, we can say that there's probably
five or 10,000 species
of different types of phytoplankton.
If they have a good environmental condition,
such as light and enough nutrients,
which are elements that allow them to grow--
think about fertilizers in your garden--
they will start dividing and growing
and making these things that we call bloom.
And some of these blooms are not great.
Some of these blooms are great.
But they're really nice for us to observe
the connectivity between this aqua sphere,
the ocean and land and atmosphere.
- So it seems like phytoplankton can have
both a positive and negative impact on Earth.
How is it possible to see these tiny creatures from space?
What does the data from the PACE mission look like?
Let's see how math can help us quantify and interpret
the data from PACE.
- So phytoplankton, similar to the plants on land,
carry a pigment called chlorophyll.
This chlorophyll is green and allows them
to do photosynthesis, to convert carbon dioxide
into the sugars that, you know,
feed the rest of the marine food web.
This green we can see from space,
and we can monitor the growth of the phytoplankton from space.
So as the phytoplankton grows,
the amount of chlorophyll changes.
And so this change in the amount of chlorophyll
is indicative of the change of the biomass.
So the first day, we can have 100 cells of phytoplankton.
Second day, we can have 200 cells of phytoplankton.
Third day, we can have 400 cells of phytoplankton.
And that means the phytoplankton is growing.
And it's going to reach a plateau,
a flat portion where for a couple of days,
we're going to see phytoplankton having just 400 cells.
It's either because predators are eating them
and controlling their growth, or because
there's no more nutrients, the elements they need to grow.
Eventually, we're going to see this bloom disappear,
and the chlorophylls are going to start disappearing,
which means their cell numbers are going down.
Probably because predators are eating them,
or they're just dying off because there's not
enough nutrients or food for them to grow.
- PACE's technology extends our human senses.
Let's take a look at the parts of the satellite
that enable us to see what our eyes cannot
by making the invisible visible.
- PACE mission is NASA's mission
to observe Earth in unprecedented way.
It gives us an opportunity to see the world
the way we've never seen it before.
PACE stands for Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, Ocean Ecosystem.
And it kind of tells you a little bit
what PACE is really looking at.
It's looking at the ocean and atmosphere,
but we can use it to study the land and ice.
The reason why we can do such a great job at PACE
is three instruments that PACE is carrying.
First one, it's called Ocean Color Instrument,
and it's an instrument that allows us to see
ocean and land in a hyperspectral way.
PACE can see 160 different colors.
And that's pretty much what PACE is allowing me
and other scientists to do, to draw the world
in such a beautiful way to understand and differentiate
different features in the ocean,
different features in the atmosphere and on land.
The two small instruments that we have on PACE
are called polarimeters.
They're SPEXone and HARP.
They're looking at the color of the light,
but also the aspect of the light that we call polarization.
And the easiest way to understand that,
if you think about your sunglasses that you have,
and you look towards somewhere and you tilt your head,
the light is going to start changing
because it's filtering light that is polarized,
that is acting in a different way.
So what these instruments are doing
are looking at the color of the light and polarization
of the light, allowing us to understand better
the types of clouds and aerosols,
so different particles we have in the atmosphere.
- NASA's PACE mission is shining a new light on phytoplankton,
revealing their essential role in supporting life on Earth.
From oxygen production to impacting the flow of carbon
within Earth's systems, these microscopic organisms
are more powerful than you may think.
See you next time on "Real World."
[dramatic music]