[unnerving music]
The ocean is full of creepy crawlies,
and in science we call them plankton.
So this Mesodinium rubrum
is like, you know, covered with hair,
goes around,
catches teeny tiny algae and eats them.
But not only that,
once it eats them,
it steals a portion of the cell that
allows them to do photosynthesis,
to be algae.
It forms these blooms
in the ocean that look
like red sticky blood,
you know, like a brownish red.
Really disgusting.
Currently, ocean color satellites
cannot distinct those blooms
from the other ones.
PACE is going to be able
to see all the colors of the rainbow.
So it's going to be able to pick up
that red bloody gloopiness.
It’s very highly abundant in
the Arctic seas, usually around the ice edge.
And what we can see from ICESat-2,
you might call skeletons
from space
in that you can see ice as it begins to form,
and it provides these structures that are very habitable to life.
One thing that ICESat-2 can do as well
is see in the ocean.
ICESat-2 produces photons
of light that penetrate
the ocean surface
and actually resolve
information about the water column itself.
The backscattered light
enabled us to characterize
what's in the ocean
in the sense of how many
particles are there
and what those particles might
be when looking over
different times.
[unsettling music]