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[unnerving music]

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The ocean is full of creepy crawlies,

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and in science
we call them plankton.

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So this Mesodinium rubrum

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is like, you know, covered with hair,

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goes around,

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catches teeny tiny algae and eats them.

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But not only that,

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once it eats them,

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it steals a portion of the cell that

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allows them to do photosynthesis,

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to be algae.

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It forms these blooms

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 in the ocean that look

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like red sticky blood,

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you know, like a brownish red.

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Really disgusting.

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Currently, ocean color satellites

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cannot distinct those blooms

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from the other ones. 

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PACE is going to be able

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to see all the colors of the rainbow.

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So it's going to be able to pick up

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that red bloody gloopiness.

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It’s very highly abundant in

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the Arctic seas,
usually around the ice edge.

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And what we can see from ICESat-2,

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you might call skeletons

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from space

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in that you can see
ice as it begins to form,

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and it provides these structures
that are very habitable to life.

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One thing that ICESat-2 can do as well

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is see in the ocean.

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ICESat-2 produces photons

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of light that penetrate

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the ocean surface

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and actually resolve

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information about the water column itself.

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The backscattered light

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enabled us to characterize

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what's in the ocean

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in the sense of how many

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particles are there

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and what those particles might

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be when looking over

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different times.

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[unsettling music]