The phenomenon of pink snow in the earth's Arctic region may be nice to look at, but it's turning out to be a bigger threat to the environment than first thought.  Early Arctic explorers attributed the rosy hue to iron deposit, but they were wrong.

Pink snow, watermelon snow, blood snow - whatever you want to call it - is the result of algae blooms, especially 'Chlamydomonas nivalis' and other cold-loving species.  Ordinarily, the algae is green.  But they turn red as they suck up ultra-violet rays from sunlight.

White snow reflects sunlight, and for centuries has kept the polar ice caps intact.  The problem is that tinted snow reduces snow's ability to reflect sunlight by 13 percent. 

A team of geo-biologists in Germany and Britain put out a new report in the journal Nature Communications:  They found that when snow gets darker with red algae, it melts faster.  This is on top of unprecedented melts occurring at the ice caps because of global warming, and it sets up a vicious cycle:  As more algae bloom, more snow thaws and nourishes microorganisms and their ability to grow.