From the UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN DENMARK and the “I can hear sea ice fanatic heads exploding already” department comes this bit of good news.
Melting sea ice may lead to more life in the sea
Melt ponds provide more light and heat for the ice and the underlying water, but now it turns out that they may also have a more direct and potentially important influence on life in the Arctic waters.
Mats of algae and bacteria can evolve in the melt ponds, which can provide food for marine creatures. This is the conclusion of researchers in the periodical, Polar Biology.
Own little ecosystems
- The melt ponds can form their own little ecosystem. When all the sea ice melts during the summer, algae and other organisms from melt ponds are released into the surrounding seawater. Some of this food is immediately ingested by creatures living high up in the water column. Other food sinks to the bottom and gets eaten by seabed dwellers, explains Heidi Louise Sørensen, who is the principal author of the scientific article, continuing:
- Given that larger and larger areas of melt ponds are being formed in the Arctic, we can expect the release of more and more food for creatures in the polar sea.
Heidi Louise Sørensen studied the phenomenon in a number of melt ponds in North-Eastern Greenland as part of her PhD thesis at University of Southern Denmark (SDU).
Bo Thamdrup and Ronnie Glud of SDU, and Erik Jeppesen and Søren Rysgaard of Aarhus University also contributed to the work.
Food for seals and sea cucumbers
In the upper part of the water column it is mainly krill and copepods that benefit from the nutrient-rich algae and bacteria from melt ponds. These creatures are eaten by various larger animals, ranging from amphipods to fish, seals and whales. Deeper down, it is seabed dwellers such as sea cucumbers and brittle stars that benefit from the algae that sink down.
For some time now, researchers have been aware that simple biological organisms can evolve in melt ponds – they may even support very diverse communities. But so far it has been unclear why sometimes there are many organisms in the ponds, and on other occasions virtually none.
According to the new study, ‘nutrients’ is the keyword. When nutrients such as phosphorus and nitrogen find their way into a melt pond, entire communities of algae and micro-organisms can flourish.
From the Siberian tundra
Nutrients can find their way into a melt pond in a variety of ways, For example, they can be washed in with waves of sea water; they can be transported by dust storms from the mainland (for example, from the Siberian tundra); or they can be washed with earth from the coast out on the ice, when it rains.
Finally, migratory birds or other larger animals resting on the ice can leave behind sources of nutrient.
- Climate change is accompanies by more storms and more precipitation, and we must expect that more nutrients will be released from the surroundings into the melt ponds. These conditions, plus the fact that the distribution of areas of melt ponds is increasing, can contribute to increased productivity in plant and animal life in the Arctic seas, says Professor Ronnie Glud of the Department of Biology at SDU.
Warmer and more windy
There are further factors that may potentially contribute to increased productivity in the Arctic seas:
- When the sea ice disappears, light can penetrate down into the water.
- water. When it gets warmer on the mainland, this creates more melt water, which can flow out into the sea, carrying nutrients in its wake.
BOX What the researchers did
Six melt ponds in Young Sound in North-Eastern Greenland were selected: two natural and four artificial basins. Phosphorous and nitrogen (nutrients, which are also known from common garden fertilizer) were added in various combinations to four ponds, while two served as control ponds. For a period of up to 13 days Heidi Louise Sørensen measured many different parameters in the melt water, including the content of Chlorophyll a: a pigment that enables algae to absorb energy from light. The chlorophyll content of the phosphorus- and nitrogen-enriched ponds was 2 to 10 times higher than in the control ponds and testifies to an increased content of algae.
BOX This is why the number of melt ponds is on the rise
Global warming is melting more and more sea ice, potentially forming an increasing number of melt ponds. NASA satellites have just measured the smallest ever distribution of sea ice in the Arctic. The melt ponds make the ice darker, so it absorbs, rather than reflects light and thereby it heats. This accelerates the melting process. Satellite photos show that areas with melt ponds are getting bigger each year.
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The paper: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00300-017-2082-7
A lesser amount of Arctic sea ice, similar to pre-LIA norms, would be totally and absolutely beneficial to everyone trying to live in the Arctic region.
Transport, commerce, fishing would all become the norm, rather than a rare occurrence for a short period of the year.
Unfortunately, the AMO is turning, and the promised RECOVERY from the extremes of the LIA has paused, and may not actually eventuate.
and it took A University to realise that if you let your (home) deep-freezer defrost/melt. its contents will come alive and variously crawl, walk or gently float or fly away.
How comforted I am to be surrounded by such genius as we head into the future…
sigh
Well, we’re making progress here…
I see everyone now accepts that the arctic sea ice is thinning and decreasing.
This may be a benefit for some arctic species… if not for polar bears, walrus and belugas.
but now we need to return to the question – why is it continuing to decline?
and what effect does that have on weather systems and the earth’s climate?
(extent and volume still at record lows as the melt season starts)
Griff:
You ask
I answer.
The Arctic sea ice varies as does precipitation, temperature, etc.. This is called weather.
Weather in one place does affect weather elsewhere, but not much.
Richard
The variation downward in extent and volume since 1979 is not ‘weather’.
“The variation downward in extent and volume since 1979 is not ‘weather’.
But climate is 30 years of ‘weather’.
Therefore, you are basing apocalypse on two data points…
Don’t you read anything that is written, bonehead?
“Unfortunately, the AMO is turning, and the promised RECOVERY from the extremes of the LIA has paused, and may not actually eventuate.”
You have been shown MANY, MANY times that current levels at far above the Holocene norm.
But you just DENY CLIMATE CHANGE.
Wilful ignorance is the ONLY thing you have in your handbag, griff.
And you do not seem to have taken on board that conditions causing low ice in the past don’t apply now.
This is beyond the scale of natural variation and cycles affecting the ice.
I wait in vain for any skeptic explanation of why this low, why now… well over 70 years since the low of the last cycle and still heading down… lowest extent and volume seen in all records since 1850… now with low extent and thickness through the winter and increase in winter storms over ice cap…
This year is already set to be in top lowest. Maybe even beating 2012, given high pressure/sun at critical point in melt season.
Replying to Griff (his comments bolded and italicized):
And you do not seem to have taken on board that conditions causing low ice in the past don’t apply now.
What “conditions” might you be referring to? Absence of humans or abscence of current human technology? Show me causal proof that humans and their current technology are making the difference you claim, rather than just postulating this premise as a foregone conclusion.
This is beyond the scale of natural variation and cycles affecting the ice.
How do arrive at this, other than by parroting the standard line? Natural variation moves both up and down, in terms of temperature and in terms of ice making, as illustrated by this graph:
Notice that I have indicated only four major points during the past 3500 years that seem to be at serious odds with your claim. There are more such points – just look at the peaks above the red horizontal line, going back to ten thousand years ago — there are at least eleven other additional times when temperature was as high or quite higher than today, via NATURAL VARIATION.
I wait in vain for any skeptic explanation of why this low, why now… well over 70 years since the low of the last cycle and still heading down… lowest extent and volume seen in all records since 1850…
What is vain about your waiting is the vanity in embracing your failure to see the greater pattern over a time span much, much longer than 70 years and the vanity in embracing your failure to see cycles that have much, much longer periods. You are confining your view ONLY to modern, instrumental recording over a very, very small cyclic period, and you are overlooking the geological records ascertained by other means over these much, much longer cyclic periods. Expand your view, and you might better grasp the big picture, instead of entertaining a myopic view based on intervals of a few human life-span generations.
Griff,
“Top lowest”? Now you’re already weaseling back from your prior prognostication that 2017 was “sure” to be the lowest “evah!”. Since, how could it not be, starting form such a low winter maximum. That was your “thought process”, if your mental function may be so dignified.
For over a decade now, the Arctic sea ice trend has been up. And it’s at least as likely for that to continue as for a renewed decrease to occur.
Unfortunately, since less ice is good and more is bad.
“This is beyond the scale of natural variation and cycles affecting the ice.”
WRONG. It is very much in line with NATURAL cycles.
Now off you trot, back to your “make-it-up-as you-go-along” hallucinogen driven imaginings.
The earth is not a straightedge problem.
As always, Griff sees what he is told to see.
Griff:
I write to ask an explanation of your astonishing claim that
How do you know it is not weather?
If you know it it is not weather then what is it and how do you know it is what you claim it is?
Richard
Griff,
The now trend is not for thinning and decreasing. For the past 12 years, the trend has been up. Arctic sea ice extent is clearly bottoming, to anyone not blinded by his or her cultic faith.
Also, are you now prepared to revise your prediction that a new record low summer Arctic sea ice extent is “certain”, in light of the fact, that as the adults here warned you could happen, spring extent appears headed for a rendezvous with the normal range next month?
In a typical year, sea ice extent would be rapidly falling late in March, but it’s not. For four days in a row now, it has risen:
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-ice-graph/
What seems to be happening is just what the grown-ups said could be the case. That is, that ice extent was low this winter because of the effects of the super El Nino of 2015-16, which affected only peripheral areas of the ice pack, those which would have melted first in any case. But the unusually cold March in the NH has now refrozen edge areas that melted previously.
Only a rank newbie would imagine that climatic phenonema are so predictable and certain. Unfortunately among the rookies are “consensus” “climate scientists”. So you’re in bad company.
Maybe there will be a new record low this summer, but it’s far from certain. And if so, it’s most likely to be followed by more up years, as after the lows of 2007 and 2012.
…Griffy, this is called LIFE, maybe you should get one…
For Griff:
“Mats of algae and bacteria can evolve in the melt ponds …”
“… simple biological organisms can evolve in melt ponds …”
Spontaneous evolution in ice ponds. So there’s hope for life on Europa after all.
Mike,
You seem to be confusing evolution with abiogenesis. Anywhere there is life, there is evolution. IMO no one is saying that algae and bacteria arose in melt ponds, although it might have happened there. For bacteria, however, more likely however through fire rather than ice, ie around deep sea hydrothermal vents. Algae are archea (with bacteria, one of the two basic forms of prokaryote) which have evolved, via endosymbiosis, to become eukaryotes, which have then acquired not just mitochondrian from bacteria, but chloroplasts as well. Chloroplasts are endosymbiotic cyanobacteria, the first photosynthetic organisms.
Another ‘Big Cheese’, this time Vladimir Putin president of Russia says:
Climate change is not manmade
“The warming, it had already started by the 1930s,” Putin said in comments broadcast from the Arctic forum held in the northern Russian city of Arkhangelsk. (I wrote about the forum yesterday, see here ).
The latest declaration is a far cry from Putin’s speech at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris in November 2015.
Putin also said Pruitt’s views deserve to be heard.
“Positions and suggestions of those who don’t agree with their opponents are not so stupid. God grant him health and success, everybody should listen to one another and only then you can find an optimal solution to the problem.”
Link
That’s old news….2.5 billion year old news in fact.
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-03/ciot-hdp033017.php
If this whole piece is a direct quote, or cut-and-paste, from a uni press release, we need to know that.
For instance, this piece says “simple biological organisms can evolve in melt ponds ” — and that is a silly thing for anyone to say. It is quite possible that the original press release is in Danish and has been translated….without a real careful review.
Point is: we need to know WHOSE words we are reading here.
Thanks.
C’mon, this is TERRIBLE NEWS!!!
We only have ONE EARTH people!!!
Where are we possibly going to put on this extra life?
Won’t it make the planet weight more and throw us out of orbit?
(Sorry, just writing next week’s “Even Good News is Bad” headline for the MSM…
weigh more and…
“weight” as a verb is the act of adding mass to (e.g. a diver’s belt).