Highly productive ice algae mats in Arctic melt ponds: Implications for primary production and carbon turnover

As the Arctic warms, the historic functioning of local ecosystems is changing in new and not always anticipated ways. One such change is the appearance and expansion of ice algal mats in the melt ponds of northern Svalbard. An expedition to this remote part of the planet was launched in July 2004 to measure the productivity of this new type of mat. Data were collected using oxygen micro electrodes, PAR sensors, and the visual analysis of samples via microscope. This dataset contains the oxygen profiles from this research. Also included are the surface temperature and salt concentrations for each core.