David Connell
Pd. 1 APES
Mr. Nagel
Article Critique #1 http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/40823/title/Subglacial-Ecosystem/ Summary: In this elaborate article, scientists show examples of how there are still forms of life under 800 meters of freezing cold water. In January 2013, scientists conducted an experiment and wanted to find out if there were possible life forms under Lake Whillans, which if you didn’t know is under the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet, which has a lot of ice. These researchers and scientists went down over 800 meters, or approximately 2,600 feet below the surface to test the water and find out if there is any life living down in the cold treacherous waters. They didn’t find just some organisms living that far down, they found an abundant amount of organisms. Microbiologist Brent Christner explained that, “The number of microorganisms we saw in the water was very comparable with what you’d find in a typical surface lake or in the ocean.” They were shocked when they figured this out. The organisms that live way under the ice do not get much sunlight so they need another source of energy, therefor, they use inorganic compounds such as ammonium, nitrate, and sulfides which in fact work just as well as sunlight. The scientists were unable to find any larger organisms unfortunately but are looking into doing more research and running more tests in the near future.
Critique: Right now we are reading about ecosystems in our textbooks, and I thought that this article is basically about ecosystems so I figured it would be perfect for this article critique. There were no forms of bias or any sort of opinion this article because it was mostly facts and facts cannot be biased. I thought that this article was very interesting and gave a lot of info about ecosystems and how organisms can live in them in the hardest of conditions. Humans would think that there is absolutely no way a form of life could live more than 2,500 feet below a sheet of ice in freezing cold water. It amazes me how some life forms can do it. This article relates to the textbooks through the use of ecosystems.