by Kate Taylor

NASA scientists say they’ve made a discovery in the Arctic Ocean ‘as dramatic and unexpected as finding a rainforest in the middle of a desert’.

When its Icescape expedition punched through three-foot thick sea ice, the team found waters richer in the microscopic marine plants known as phytoplankton than any other ocean region on Earth.

The expedition explored Arctic waters in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas along Alaska’s western and northern coasts onboard a US Coast Guard icebreaker.

"Part of NASA’s mission is pioneering scientific discovery, and this is like finding the Amazon rainforest in the middle of the Mojave Desert," says Paula Bontempi, NASA’s ocean biology and biogeochemistry program manager in Washington.

"We embarked on Icescape to validate our satellite ocean-observing data in an area of the Earth that is very difficult to…