This is just one post in the Climate change & water supply Category

Death bloom of plankton a warning on warming

Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on November 21, 2008 at 5:17 am

From the San Francisco Chronicle:

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 R. 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.