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Surviving Without Ice

By Guest PostSeptember 15, 2012Environment, Natureamphipods, apherusa glacialis, arctic crustaceans, arctic ocean, disney movie, Environment, finding nemo, fram strait, geir johnsen, gulf stream, jorgen berge, life cycle, mark moline, melt, nemo hypothesis, north pole, ocean current, sea ice, shrimp

Arctic crustaceans use currents, deep-water migration to survive sea ice melts

With sea ice in the Arctic melting to record lows in summer months, marine animals living there face dramatic changes to their environment. Yet some crustaceans, previously thought to spend their entire lives on the underside of sea ice, were recently discovered to migrate deep underwater and follow ocean currents back to colder areas when ice disappears.

“Our findings provide a basic new understanding of the adaptations and biology of the ice-associated organisms within the Arctic Ocean,” said Mark Moline, director of the University of Delaware’s School of Marine Science and Policy in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment. “They also may ultimately change the perception of ice fauna as imminently threatened by the predicted disappearance of perennial sea ice.” (more…)

Critically Endangered Whales Sing Like Birds; New Recordings Hint At Rebound

By Guest PostAugust 1, 2012Natureacoustics, alaskan beaufort sea, Arctic, Arctic sea ice, birds, bowhead whales, breeding ground, catherine berchok, christian lydersen, commercial whaling, declines, endangered whales, fram strait, greenland, hydrophone, islands of norway, kate stafford, microphones, migration path, population, sing, skull, sue moore, university of washington, variety of tunes, whale song

When a University of Washington researcher listened to the audio picked up by a recording device that spent a year in the icy waters off the east coast of Greenland, she was stunned at what she heard: whales singing a remarkable variety of songs nearly constantly for five wintertime months.

Kate Stafford, an oceanographer with UW’s Applied Physics Lab, set out to find if any endangered bowhead whales passed through the Fram Strait, an inhospitable, ice-covered stretch of sea between Greenland and the northern islands of Norway. Only around 40 sightings of bowhead whales, which were hunted almost to extinction, have been reported there since the 1970s. (more…)

Warming North Atlantic Water Tied to Heating Arctic, According to New Study

By Guest PostJanuary 31, 20111 commentEnvironmentalaska, archipelago, arctic ocean, Arctic sea ice, arctic warming, foraminifera shells, fram strait, global warming in the arctic, greenland, ice free, kirstin werner, loss of arctic sea ice, medieval warm period, north atlantic ocean water, norway, robert spielhagen, svalbard, temperature, thomas marchitto, university of colorado at boulder

The temperatures of North Atlantic Ocean water flowing north into the Arctic Ocean adjacent to Greenland — the warmest water in at least 2,000 years — are likely related to the amplification of global warming in the Arctic, says a new international study involving the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Led by Robert Spielhagen of the Academy of Sciences, Humanities and Literature in Mainz, Germany, the study showed that water from the Fram Strait that runs between Greenland and Svalbard — an archipelago constituting the northernmost part of Norway — has warmed roughly 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit in the past century. The Fram Strait water temperatures today are about 2.5 degrees F warmer than during the Medieval Warm Period, which heated the North Atlantic from roughly 900 to 1300 and affected the climate in Northern Europe and northern North America. (more…)

Tag Archives: fram strait

Surviving Without Ice

Critically Endangered Whales Sing Like Birds; New Recordings Hint At Rebound

Warming North Atlantic Water Tied to Heating Arctic, According to New Study