The tropics are moving into the arctic. Free Technical Library News

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Tropics move to the Arctic

03.08.2012

Live tropical and subtropical species of marine protists have been found in the Arctic Ocean. Plankton traveled thousands of kilometers with the help of Atlantic currents and ended up near Norway, where they were found by local and American scientists. So far, oceanologists do not link this fact directly with global warming: most likely, there was a cyclic "impulse" that threw plankton into the northern waters. However, the Arctic waters are heating up very quickly, and there will be more and more such impulses.

The living creatures in question are radiolarians, microscopic unicellular organisms that live in almost all regions of the world's oceans. Since many radiolarians have been trapped in the mud over millions of years, scientists can also use them to study temperature fluctuations in the distant past and present.

A ship from the Norwegian Polar Institute was conducting routine plankton sampling northwest of the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, about halfway between the European mainland and the North Pole. When the scientists analyzed the samples, they were surprised to find that out of 145 taxa (samples), 98 came from the south, even from hot regions like the tropics. Most likely, the "invaders" were brought by the warm North Atlantic Current (an extension of the Gulf Stream), which travels from the Caribbean to the North Atlantic, but usually depletes somewhere between Greenland and Europe.

Previously, oceanologists have already found out that sometimes pulses of warm water penetrate the Norwegian coastline and the Arctic basin. Such impulses occurred in 1920, 1930 and 1950, and also, as we now know, in 2010.

Unfortunately, the periodicity of such events does not mean that they are habitual for the Arctic and global warming does not threaten to “contaminate” the North with organisms from another ecosystem. Research shows that due to global climate change, the impulses are becoming more frequent and penetrate further into the heart of the Arctic Ocean. So, in the northern waters, radiolarians were able to live for about a month. At first glance, this is not much, but this time is enough for plankton to give birth to 80 generations and, in theory, begin to adapt to colder water.

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