Arctic spring's 'rapid advance'

[Barrett808]

Source: BBC

Spring in the Arctic is arriving "weeks earlier" than a decade ago, a team of Danish researchers have reported.

Ice in north-east Greenland is melting an average of 14.6 days earlier than in the mid-1990s, bringing forward the date plants flower and birds lay eggs.

The team warned that the observed changes could disrupt the region's ecosystems and food chain, affecting the long-term survival of some species.

...

Observation of 21 species - six plants, 12 arthropods and three birds - revealed that the organisms had brought forward their flowering, emergence or egg-laying in line with the earlier ice melt.

"We were particularly surprised to see the trends were so strong when considering that the entire summer is very short in the High Arctic - just three or four months from snowmelt to freeze-up," said co-author Toke Hoye, from the University of Aarhus. "The real deciding factor is that each individual time series has a very close correlation, so it is not just that the average trend is very similar but each species is closely coupled (to the ice melt)."

Read more: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6763511.stm

[rodeodance]

1. late Aug is here already in East Wisconsin---grass DEAD--not just brown

[Demeter]

2. The Michigan Magnolias Were Trying to Flower in January

and got all their buds frozen off because of it when winter suddenly returned for part 2.

[lovuian]

3. I can't imagine 24 hour sun without Ice and snow

its going to be incredibly warm

the North Artic as we know it will be gone and a New world to be seen

[slampoet]

5. Actually the artic receives less heat because the sun has a lower angle in the sky.

If you average a whole year they receive as much daylight hours as any other latitude.

[Lisa]

4. interesting ...

Aside from the concerns about the long-term ecological impacts ... this is quite an insight into how temperature-dependent many of these biological events are. (When I was working at an Arctic research station a couple of decades ago, several of the scientists were musing about whether it would be possible to do an experiment that would show whether the plants were more responsive to temperature, water, or nutrient availability .... one of the guys even wired together some heating elements and installed them in the tundra, to see what would happen to growth rates.)

[Barrett808]

6. Right, and the worry is that differing thermal responses among species...

...will cause biomes to unravel.

[Lisa]

7. there could be quite an ecological cascade effect

Gore already mentioned some of the problems with mismatches in timing between predators and prey species -- and I'm afraid that the bird/caterpillar example he gave was just "the tip of the iceberg", if you excuse the expression! I seem to recall one of the scientists I met telling me that migrating geese are counting on there being plenty of tender plant shoots when they arrive up North -- if they get there too early, the new growth hasn't happened yet, and if they're too late, the plants have already matured and are harder to digest. If the birds don't get the nutrients they need, this affects their breeding ability.

Not just the temperature itself, but the indirect relationships too, like soil moisture levels (partly dependent on precipitation, which itself would be affected by global warming ... also evaporation and the rate of snowmelt). The same researcher who was doing the tundra heating experiments told me that whether or not you get black or white spruce in an area will depend on moisture content, because white spruce is less resistant to having its roots saturated. He said that literally a couple of days either way could alter forest composition.

[Barrett808]

10. "Sensitive dependence on initial conditions..."

One of the signatures of nonlinear (chaotic) systems.

[Lisa]

11. something which ecological theories earlier in the 20th century tended to ignore

... until non-equilibrium views gained more traction (e.g. due to findings in fire ecology, and more rigorous tests of the older Clementsian succession theories). Good point, Barrett808. Unfortunately a lot of resource management people (many foresters, for example) did not consider the implications of chaos theory until fairly recently, and insisted on claiming that we can predict the composition and likely harvest date for forests with absolute certainty, a century from now!

[Uncle Joe]

8. Thanks for the thread Barrett

Kicked, too late to recommend.

[TX-RAT]

9. Another interesting link.

http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2006/11/17/cooling-the-debate-a-longer-record-of-greenland-air-temperature/

[superconnected]

12. I just saw my 2nd mosquito here. The first was over a month ago.

Still no fleas on the cats.

I've never had a summer like this before. I'm in Everett, WA.

Normally mosquitos are everywhere as soon as it gets hot and fleas abound all year so I have to use advantage. I've gone 6 months without fleas now. Never in my friggen life have I seen something like that here. I was born here and have always had animals.

The weather is mercurial but that's not uncommon. It's the absence of bugs that is foreign to me. How does that suddenly happen? Pesticides? I live in a city.