Climate change fear for Antarctic sea life
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Your support makes all the difference.Global warming is threatening the future of thousands of exotic sea animals living in Antarctic oceans, a study by British scientists has found.
A predicted sea temperature rise of only two degrees Celsius would destroy marine wildlife including giant Antarctic sea spiders and crustaceans that grew up to one thousand times bigger than their warmer cousins. Scientists at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) in Cambridge had revealed that almost all marine animals living in the world's coldest oceans were sensitive to slight increases in temperature, said Lloyd Peck of the BAS.
"The temperature in the oceans around Antarctica is very constant. At some sites it varies by just a fifth of a degree throughout the year. It's been like that for around 10 million years. Experiments show that these marine animals die quickly when ambient sea temperatures reach between 5C and 10C. Sea temperatures of just 2C or 3C cause them to lose the ability to survive."
That is the sort of rise in sea temperature that is predicted by government climatologists at the Hadley Centre using computer models of global warming.
"The Hadley Centre model predicts a sea temperature rise of 2C to 3C over the next 100 years," Dr Peck said.
"If we experience that average rise in the Antarctic it will take summer temperatures to 3C, the exact level where these animals have problems," Dr Peck said.
Average summer temperatures of oceans near Antarctica hover around 0.5C.
"If the models are correct we are likely to lose large populations of scallops, bivalve molluscs, giant isopods and giant sea spiders. Every species we've looked at falls into that category," he said.
"We've looked at herbivores, carnivores and detritivores, animals that scavenge. It looks like all groups in the food web will be affected."
There are 750 species of amphipods in the Antarctic that may be affected. "We're talking about thousands of species in total," Dr Peck said.
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