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+--- Thread: Less ice in arctic ocean has complex effects on marine ecosystem & ocean productivity (/thread-15530.html)
Less ice in arctic ocean has complex effects on marine ecosystem & ocean productivity - C C - Mar 4, 2024
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1036003
PRESS RELEASE: Over the past 25 years, the amount of summer Arctic sea ice has diminished by more than 1 million square kilometers. As a result, vast areas of the Arctic Ocean are now, on average, ice free in summer. Scientists are closely monitoring how this impacts sunlight availability and marine ecosystems in the far north.
“Many questions arise when such large areas become ice-free and can receive sunlight. A prevailing paradigm suggests that the Arctic Ocean is rapidly becoming more productive as sunlight becomes more abundant in the marine environment. However, it is unclear how ecosystems will evolve in response to increasing sunlight availability and how different components will be affected”, says Karl Attard, a marine scientist and Assistant Professor at the Department of Biology, University of Southern Denmark.
Attard has led an international research team investigating sunlight availability and photosynthetic production on the understudied Arctic seafloor. Their study has been published in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
The research team focused on the vast shelf regions of the Arctic Ocean; portions of the seafloor that are relatively shallow, rarely exceeding 200 meters in depth. These vast regions, accounting for around half of the Arctic Ocean area, make it particularly interesting to study how seafloor ecosystems respond as sea ice continues to diminish... (MORE - details, no ads)