Oopsy! Arctic plankton will switch from sink to source in warmer oceans [View all]

[GliderGuider]

Arctic plankton will switch from sink to source in warmer oceans

Mounting evidence confirming the effects of a 5°C increase in the Arctic Ocean temperature has led an international team of researchers to issue a stark warning about the perils the world faces in the near future.

The international scientific team was led by the Director of The University of Western Australia's Oceans Institute, Professor Carlos M Duarte, who said resolving the role of Arctic plankton as a source or sink for CO2 was of major importance in considering the carbon budget of the planet.

‘This research revealed that the two-week spring algal bloom occurring in April as the Arctic emerges from its winter darkness and the sea-ice starts to thin is so productive it can fuel the food web for the entire year and remove significant amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere on an annual basis,’ he said.

However, experiments involving temperature manipulations conducted in the Svalbard Islands (about 650 kilometres north of mainland Europe), indicated that the plankton community switches from acting as a sink to acting as a source of CO2 to the atmosphere at seawater temperatures in excess of 5°C. The researchers noted that this temperature will be regularly observed in the European Sector of the Arctic Ocean over the coming decades.

And the hits just keep on coming. Prof. Duarte is one of the experts on the A-team that apparently briefed the WH on the collapse of Arctic ice.