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Antarctica is
Changing as Climate Warms
March 21,2009 Rutgers, The
State University of New Jersey-Antarctica is Changing as Climate Warms
Scientists who have been going to Antarctica regularly have noticed unmistakable
signs that the continent is changing as the climate warms. No place is showing a
larger winter warming than the northwest coast of the Antarctic Peninsula –
the long arm of the continent that reaches northward
Oscar Schofield, left, and Martin
Montes-Hugo have described the southward shift of phytoplankton along the
western Antarctic Peninsula. toward South America.
Rutgers researchers and students
from the Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences have been busy over the
Antarctic summer documenting and reporting those changes.
A March 13, 2009 article in
Science documents for the first time that phytoplankton, the base of the food
chain, are diminishing off the northwestern Antarctic Peninsula and increasing
southward. Lead author Martin Montes-Hugo, a postdoctoral scholar in the
institute's Coastal Ocean Observation Laboratory (COOL) analyzed 30 years of
satellite and field data showing phytoplankton decreasing in the north by 12
percent, while increasing in the south. Among Montes-Hugo's co-authors are Oscar
Schofield, professor of marine science and co-director of COOL and Hugh Ducklow
of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass. Phytoplankton "We
are showing for the first time that there is an ongoing change in phytoplankton
concentration and composition along the western shelf of the Antarctic Peninsula
that is associated with a long-term climate modification," Montes-Hugo
said. "These changes may explain in part the observed decline of some
penguin populations." The main food of these Adelie penguins is krill, tiny
crustaceans that depend, in turn, on phytoplankton. Krill have been diminishing
off the northwest Antarctic Peninsula and increasing in the south. The absence
of their food source has been suggested to explain the observed declines in the
Adelies, that once nested in their tens of thousands on islands near the United
States research base at Palmer Station. Researchers have known that larger
animals, such as Adelie penguins, have been diminishing near the research
station. Schofield, who has been going there since his graduate student days
nearly two decades ago, has seen the change up close. "Ecologists working
at Palmer have documented declines from close to 15,000 breeding pairs of
Adelies in the mid 1970s to about 3,000 pairs at Palmer Station today," he
said.
Rutgers undergraduate Mike Garzio,
hauling a probe aboard the RV Gould during a recent Antarctic cruise.
"Now we know that climate
changes are impacting at the base of the food web and forcing their effects on
up through the food chain," said Ducklow, of the Marine Biological
Laboratory. "Martin Montes-Hugo's elegant work, utilizing different
satellite streams of data, nailed that down." The paper in Science is based
on satellite sources and field data from scientists like Schofield, who have
been going to Antarctica regularly for many years. The National Science
Foundation sponsors a summer cruise each January, and Schofield, like most
researchers who have a place in that cruise, regularly takes graduate students.
This year, he also took some undergraduate students, including Mike Garzio, a
senior from Hamilton, N.J., majoring in ecology and natural resources and
minoring in marine science. "It was my first real research cruise and real
field work, and I'm grateful to Dr. Schofield for asking me to join him,"
Garzio said. "I want to stay in academia my entire life and do research, so
a chance to be part of a team researching climate change effects in the most
rapidly changing was great for me."
Contact: Ken Branson
732-932-7084, ext. 633 E-mail: kbranson@ur.rutgers.edu
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