Ocean Warming Threatens Antarctic Wildlife

Ocean warming threatens Antarctic wildlife

· Sea ice melts and glaciers shrink at accelerating rate
· Decline in stocks of krill hits entire food chain

David Adam, environment correspondent
Wednesday October 19, 2005
The Guardian


Scientists working in Antarctica have discovered an alarming rise in sea temperature that threatens to disrupt populations of penguins, whales, seals and a host of smaller creatures within a few decades.

The new study shows the ocean west of the Antarctic Peninsula has warmed by more than a degree since the 1960s - confounding computer models and experts who believed that a combination of ice, winds and currents would keep the water cool and shield fragile marine creatures from the effects of climate change. This is the first evidence that the key Southern Ocean is getting warmer: a finding with potentially severe implications for wildlife.

Lloyd Peck, a marine biologist with the British Antarctic Survey, said: "The sea temperature is going up in a way that wasn't predicted and this makes me more worried for the marine animals. The evidence we've got and the models we've been looking at said sea temperature was not likely to change much in the Antarctic. A one degree increase puts us into the region where the animals are pushed to one end of their biological, physiological and ecological capabilities."

Animals that live on the seabed around the Antarctic Peninsula, where summertime water temperatures currently peak at about 0.5C, are sensitive to small shifts in temperature. In water just two degrees warmer, molluscs become unable to bury themselves in seabed sediment, limpets cannot turn over and scallops lose the ability to swim. These changes would make them more susceptible to predators, disrupting the food chain and quickly endangering larger animals and birds.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/frontpage/story/0,16518,1595446,00.html

think that it is perfectly natural for hundreds of millions of automobiles not to mention factories to spew poison in to the atmosphere and it not threaten all life as we know it. People have died from carbon monoxide poisoning just while idling their cars, magnify this by hundreds of millions or billions of times and our planet becomes one large garage.