[Vision2020] Shifting spring: Arctic plankton blooming up to 50 days earlier now

Ted Moffett starbliss at gmail.com
Mon Mar 7 11:31:22 PST 2011


Thanks for this article.

What is puzzling is that often in the media (newspapers/Internet/TV...
whatever) discussions focus on Arctic sea ice extent, not volume.
Data is available on Arctic sea ice volume, that is in some respects
more indicative of the potential for long term loss of Arctic sea ice
cover, and long term overall climate and ecosystem changes.  Even if
there is recovery of Arctic sea ice cover (extent), as happened in
2008 after the current record low summer Arctic sea ice extent of
2007, when the ice is thin, with less thick multi-year ice cover,
Arctic sea ice is increasingly vulnerble to future loss.

The record low Arctic summer sea ice extent of 2007 was not surpassed
in 2008-09-10, but if trusting the data below from PIOMAS from the
Polar Science Center at the University of Washington, since 2007
Arctic sea ice volume has plummetted below the 1979-2009 trend line,
with an all time (within the timespan of data) record low volume set
in 2010.  This data is often ignored by the skeptics of anthropogenic
climate warming, or rejected as unreliable, as they emphasize that the
Arctic sea ice summer low extent has not yet exceeded the 2007 record
low.  Data and information on PIOMAS at websites below:

http://psc.apl.washington.edu/ArcticSeaiceVolume/IceVolume.php

http://psc.apl.washington.edu/ArcticSeaiceVolume/images/BPIOMASIceVolumeAnomalyCurrent.png
-------------------
The article is to be applauded for mentioning that the dramatic
changes ongoing in the Arctic have been predicted for a long time by
"climate researchers."

The magnitude of temperature changes in the Arctic from anthropogenic
climate warming have been exected to be greater than any other area on
Earth, given the "polar amplification" effect from increasing
atmospheric CO2 radiative forcing, that has been predicted by climate
models for decades.  This trend is empirically validated with data
from 1960-90, as shown below from NOAA.  It is not as though the
changes in the Arctic have only in the past two decades been occuring,
which is the impression some might receive from media coverage of this
issue.  There is a promotion in media of the idea the climate changes
in the Arctic are only a local temporary trend, that will soon reverse
itself.

NOAA websites below mentioning "polar amplification" and the Arctic
(North Pole):

http://celebrating200years.noaa.gov/breakthroughs/climate_model/welcome.html#descendents

http://celebrating200years.noaa.gov/breakthroughs/climate_model/Obstrends.html

Text from website above:

"Computer models have long predicted that the climate change will
affect Arctic and subarctic regions earlier and more dramatically than
other parts of the world.  Recent studies show marked increases in
temperature and many other climate variables across much of the far
north. Observed trends in surface air temperature from 1960-1990
(shown above in degrees centigrade) demonstrate "polar amplification,”
with largest temperature increases (shown in red and magenta)
occurring near the North Pole."
-----------------------------
The fact that climate change is impacting the Arctic more than any
other area on Earth, where few people live, is part of the problem of
advancing technological, economic, social and political change to
address the problem.  If the major economic military powers on Earth
were located in the Arctic, it would be more difficult for the
propaganda to obfuscate the evidence of a dramtically changing
climate, to succeed.

Sheila Watt-Cloutier, 2007 Nobel Peace Prize nominee, who lost the
prize to Al Gore, unfortunately, in my opinion, has been a passionate
advocate for Arctic people, and other indigenous people, whose
traditional way of life is being destroyed primarily by the actions of
the major industrial powers, as they dump hundreds of billions of tons
of CO2 into the Earth's atmosphere, as though it were on open sewer,
inducing radical climate change.

I'll let her words speak for me.

Sheila Watt-Cloutier's 2007 testimony before the Inter-American
Commission on Human Rights can be read at website below:

http://earthjustice.org/news/press/2007/nobel-prize-nominee-testifies-about-global-warming
------------------------------------------
Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett


On 3/7/11, Saundra Lund <v2020 at ssl1.fastmail.fm> wrote:
> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/03/06/AR2011030602
> 931.html?wprss=rss_nation
> OR
> http://tinyurl.com/twp-shifting-spring
>
>
> Shifting spring: Arctic plankton blooming up to 50 days earlier now
>
> By Brian Vastag
> Washington Post Staff Writer
> Sunday, March 6, 2011; 6:39 PM
>
> Climate researchers have long warned that the Arctic is particularly
> vulnerable to global warming. The dramatic shrinking of sea ice in areas
> circling the North Pole highlights those concerns.
>
> A new report finds that the disappearing ice has apparently triggered
> another dramatic event - one that could disrupt the entire ecosystem of
> fish, shellfish, birds, and marine mammals that thrive in the harsh northern
> climate.
>
> Each summer, an explosion of tiny ocean-dwelling plants and algae, called
> phytoplankton, anchors the Arctic food web.
>
> But these vital annual blooms of phytoplankton are now peaking up to 50 days
> earlier than they did just 14 years ago, satellite data show.
>
> "The ice is retreating earlier in the Arctic, and the phytoplankton blooms
> are also starting earlier," said study leader Mati Kahru, an oceanographer
> at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego.
>
> Drawing on observations from three American and European climate satellites,
> Kahru and his international team studied worldwide phytoplankton blooms from
> 1997 through 2009. The satellites can spot the blooms by their color, as
> billions of the tiny organisms turn huge swaths of the ocean green for a
> week or two.
>
> The blooms peaked earlier and earlier in 11 percent of the areas where
> Kahru's team was able to collect good data. Kahru said the impacted zones
> cover roughly 1 million square kilometers, including portions of the Foxe
> Basin and the Baffin Sea, which belong to Canada, and the Kara Sea north of
> Russia.
>
> In the late 1990s, phytoplankton blooms in these areas hit their peak in
> September, only after a summer's worth of relative warmth had melted the
> edges of the polar ice cap. But by 2009 the blooms' peaks had shifted to
> early July.
>
> "The trend is obvious and significant, and in my mind there is no doubt it
> is related to the retreat of the ice," said Kahru, who published the work in
> the journal Global Change Biology.
>
> "A 50-day shift is a big shift," said plankton researcher Michael Behrenfeld
> of Oregon State University, who was not involved in the study. "As the
> planet warms, the threat is that these changes seen closer to land may
> spread across the entire Arctic."
>
> Ecologists worry that the early blooms could unravel the region's ecosystem
> and "lead to crashes of the food web," said William Sydeman, who studies
> ocean ecology as president of the nonprofit Farallon Institute in Petaluma,
> Calif.
>
> When phytoplankton explode in population during the blooms, tiny animals
> called zooplankton - which include krill and other small crustaceans -
> likewise expand in number as they harvest the phytoplankton. Fish, shellfish
> and whales feed on the zooplankton, seabirds snatch the fish and shellfish,
> and polar bears and seals subsist on those species.
>
> The timing of this sequential harvest is programmed into the reproductive
> cycles of many animals, Sydeman said. "It's all about when food is
> available." So the disrupted phytoplankton blooms could "have cascading
> effects up the food web all the way to marine mammals."
>
> But the Arctic food web is poorly studied, and so any resulting decline in
> fish, seabirds and mammals will be difficult to spot.
>
> As the Arctic Ocean north becomes less and less icy, commercial fisherman
> have begun eyeing these vast, untapped waters as an adjunct to the famously
> rich fishing grounds of the subarctic Bering Sea, west of Alaska.
>
> But in 2009, the U.S. body overseeing fishing in the region, the North
> Pacific Fishery Management Council, banned commercial fishing in the Arctic
> Ocean, citing a lack of knowledge about how many - or even what kind - of
> fish live there.
>
> "There are no catches authorized because we don't know enough about the fish
> populations there to set a quota," said Julie Speegle, a spokeswoman for the
> Alaska office of the National Marine Fisheries Service.
>
> Last week, that service reported results from the first fish survey in 30
> years of the Beaufort Sea, an arm of the Arctic Ocean north of Alaska. The
> survey found sizeable populations of several commercially valuable species,
> including pollock, Pacific cod, and snow crab.
>
> How these populations will respond to the ever-earlier plankton blooms is a
> big unknown, Sydeman said. But other research has shown that northern
> Atlantic cod populations crash when plankton blooms in that region shift in
> time.
>
> Last week, the National Snow and Ice Data Center, in Boulder, Colo.,
> reported that in February, Arctic sea ice covered a smaller area than ever
> seen in that month, tying with February 2005 as the most ice-free February
> since satellites began tracking Arctic ice in 1979. The annual average
> Arctic sea ice coverage has decreased about 12 percent since then, a trend
> that appears to be accelerating, said Walt Meier, a research scientist at
> the center. Summer ice coverage has declined even more dramatically, he
> said, with the Arctic losing almost a third of its late-summer ice over the
> past 30 years.
>
>



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