Despite Rapid Sea Temp Increases, Fjords Of Antarctic Peninsula Brimming With Life
LONDON – Arctic fjords are poor places, low in marine life and muddied by glacial melt water. In the southern ocean, where everything is upside down, it’s a different story. Scientists from the University of Hawaii report that they found unexpected riches deep in the fjords of the Antarctic Peninsula.
The Peninsula is one of the fastest-warming places on the planet. On land, researchers have used 150 years of moss growth as a kind of archive of change, and recorded a warming of 0.56°C per decade since the 1960s.
But researchers who photographed the sea floor found an abundance of bristle worms, sea spiders, sea cucumbers, crustaceans, jellyfish and of krill, they report in the journal PLOS One. This is precisely what they had not expected: on the evidence of the rapidly-warming Arctic waters, these Peninsula fjords should have been much less lively.
“There appears to be something special about these fjords that stimulates sea floor productivity,” says Laura Grange, of the UK National Oceanography Center at the University of Southampton, who collaborated in the study.
EDIT
http://www.climatecentral.org/news/antarctic-fjord-marine-life-puzzles-scientists-16855
= new reply since forum marked as read
One of the theories behind the start of the Last Ice Age was that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet collapsed, increasing world wide sea level by about 5 meter or about 20 feet, then about 80 years later world wide sea level dropped 80 feet and the ice age was on.
http://www.imaja.com/as/environment/can/journal/madhousecentury.html
Basically the theory goes this way, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) collapses within a couple of days or weeks and starts to float. As an ICE SHEET, the WAIS is not only displacing water it would be if in melted, but additional ice volume that when it melts raises world wide sea levels about 5 meters. This also opens up West Antarctica to water flowing from the Atlantic directly by various islands that make up West Antarctica and bring with it massive amount of trace elements needed for life.
Presently the Southern Ocean, the Ocean that goes in a Circle around Antarctica, keeps all nutrients and other elements within the Southern Ocean, almost none get into the Southern Indian Atlantic and Pacific oceans. These are three of the five ocean deserts known, do to a lack of oxygen and other trace elements. These five deserts tend to be just above and below the Equator (Must like land deserts, tend to be just above and below the Equator.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24398394
The breakup of the WAIS would open up a huge new waterway for water to travel through, but it would aim that water flow right into these Ocean Deserts. Right now, these ocean deserts are in the tropics just north or south of the border of the tropics. Being in the tropics there is little east west, west east movement of weather. What weather you get, is what you can expect. Weather tends to be local. The big exception is the Monsoons, which are driven do to the temperature difference between the deserts in the tropics and Antarctica. The greater the difference the stronger the monsoon. It is believe that the Sahara was hotter 8000 years ago then it is today, as it cooled down the monsoon became weaker and the Sahara changed from grassland to desert (120 degree may be to "Cold" for the Sahara to pull water from Antarctica).
If the WAIS is open and the Current of the Southern Ocean moves into it, that would force a lot of water to go someplace and take what ever nutrients and other elements the water has with it. Depending on how the current flows, it may make the Indian Ocean to disappear along with the South Atlantic or the South Pacific ocean desert to disappear. The long term affect would be an Ice Age as a huge amount of carbon is pulled from the atmosphere.
If the above does happen, we are in for an exciting century.
