But what makes the Ross Sea important is the vast sea of pack ice that in the spring and summer provides a wealth of phytoplankton and krill that supports what, till recently, has been a virtually intact near-shore ecosystem.

And what they're finding is that even trace amounts of oil and dispersants can be highly toxic to phytoplankton, which is very bad news, because so much life depends on it.

And in the spring, when the sun returns to the ice, it forms the phytoplankton, grows under that ice, and then you get bigger sheets of seaweed, and then you get the zooplankton feeding on all that life.

Indirect measurements have shown that the global phytoplankton population may have decreased by as much as 40 percent between 1950 and 2010 because of climate change.

The nitrogen and the phosphorus stimulate the growth of microscopic plants called phytoplankton.

Well, it now turns out that the whales are crucial to sustaining that entire ecosystem, and one of the reasons for this is that they often feed at depth and then they come up to the surface and produce what biologists politely call large fecal plumes, huge explosions of poop right across the surface waters, up in the photic zone, where there's enough light to allow photosynthesis to take place, and those great plumes of fertilizer stimulate the growth of phytoplankton, the plant plankton at the bottom of the food chain, which stimulate the growth of zooplankton, which feed the fish and the krill and all the rest of it.

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