Posted on 12/06/2008 8:05:55 PM PST by Coleus
Vanishing Arctic sea ice brought on by climate change is causing the crucially important microscopic marine plants called phytoplankton to bloom explosively and die away as never before, a phenomenon that is likely to create havoc among migratory creatures that rely on the ocean for food, Stanford scientists have found.
A few organisms may benefit from this disruption of the Arctic’s fragile ecology, but a variety of animals, from gray whales to seabirds, will suffer, said Stanford biological oceanographer Kevin Arrigo.
"It’s all a question of timing," Arrigo said. "If migratory animals reach the Arctic and find the phytoplankton’s gone, they’ll have missed the boat."
Phytoplankton throughout the world’s oceans is the crucial nutrient at the base of the food web on which all marine life depends; when it’s plentiful, life thrives, and when it’s gone, marine life is impossible.
Arrigo and his colleagues gathered 10 years of observations from six NASA satellites to study changes in the evidence of chlorophyll — a key to measuring the annual abundance and disappearance of phytoplankton blooms — at the surface of the oceans. The satellite network has also recorded the yearly appearance and disappearance of vast expanses of sea ice and the increasing areas of open ocean all around the Arctic, an indication of how climate change is taking hold in the northern reaches of the globe.
A report of their findings is to appear in the current issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
The annual deep freeze that has covered much of the northern seas with ice around the polar regions was once a regular event, but what has been normal for millennia in the High Arctic is no longer the case. As global climate change has warmed the world’s oceans, warmer water has moved into the frigid Arctic, causing changes in the once-regular appearance and disappearance of sea ice over vast areas.
The result is a shift in when explosive blooms of phytoplankton appear and disappear, Arrigo’s team has found.
"It’s a complex system," Arrigo said in an interview, "but as the changes in ice cover throw the timing of phytoplankton abundance off, then the birds and animals whose brains have long been programmed to migrate north at specific times of the year will have missed the boat if there’s no nourishment for them when they get there."
See my #20. The 70s were filled with doomsday predictions of environmental disaster via Hollywood.
Ice has returned with a vengence this year to the Arctic. This third rate rag does no investigation whatsoever, just printing the loony press releases from the Gore envronmental-wacko wing of the democrat party.
A thousand years ago the Earth was warmer. How war?
The Vicking grew wheat in Greenland and found grapes at their short-lived colony in Nova Scotia.
The mini-Ice began, suddenly, around 1200-1250 and continued for over 250 years.
Some say we are still recovering.
Earth has a fever? No, it’s just getting over a cold!
jeez, global warming.....again?
Ah, but the “conveyor”, that deep ocean stream containing huge amounts of dissolved CO2, is running again in the Atlantic, carrying very cold water back down south to the warmer latitudes.
Remember, that huge plankton growth was based on an immediate doubling (from 380 today to 500+ and 700+) ....
Actual temperatures are declining slightly that past ten years, but have increased only .2 degrees since 1900. Ice levels have NOT significantly changed, but have moved (summertime) with winds, and have been the same in winter.
So, what would cause the massive blooms? It - like the supposed acidization of the sea causing the sound propagation change, causing the whales to die - is exaggerated fiction.
As one who works in the business, this is utter horsesh*t..
It’s my job!
Er, uhm, yes.
I said nothing about the alleged role of temperatures and ice levels. I did say, however, that elevated levels of CO2 can and will lead to increased phytoplankton production. That is not fiction.
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