NASA has revealed its discovery of a massive algae bloom under the slowly diminishing Arctic ice — a finding that made scientists’ eyes pop. But does this never-before-seen phenomenon change the fate of this microscopic algae?

Not long ago, this crucial plant life — which produces much of the world’s oxygen — was reported in a century-long tailspin.

Here’s the back story.

The same year that NASA researchers launched the Icescape expedition to the Arctic — the project that resulted in NASA’s astounding new discovery — there was a dire report on the world’s phytoplankton.

A Canadian team said in the journal Nature, as The Times reported in July 2010, that the world’s phytoplankton had been disappearing at a rate of about 1% a year for the previous 100 years.

‘A global decline of this magnitude? It’s quite shocking,’ Daniel Boyce, Dalhousie University marine scientist and lead author of the 2010 study, told The Times.

Phytoplankton — the basis of the marine food chain — ‘are key to the whole ecosystem,’ he said. ‘In terms of climate changes, the effect on fisheries, we don’t know exactly what these effects will be.’

Could his latest discovery of a mass of phytoplankton in the Arctic signal […]