Bring It On!

Marine Biologists Credited Global Warming

February 26th, 2007 | by Craig R. Harmon |

for making their job much easier.

Looking down 2,800 feet into the icy water — a comparatively shallow depth — [scientists] found fauna usually associated with seabeds about three times that deep, in places where the creatures must adapt to scarcity to survive.

There were blue ice fish, with dorsal fins like ribbed fans and blood that lacks red cells, an adaptation that makes the blood more fluid and easier to pump through the animal’s body, conserving energy at low temperatures.

Long-limbed sea stars, some with more than the usual five appendages, mingled with the ice fish, and groups of sea cucumbers were observed moving together, all in one direction.

The explorers also found thick settlements of fast-growing animals called sea squirts, which look like gelatinous bags, which apparently started colonizing the area only after the ice shelves collapsed.

Among the hundreds of specimens collected, the scientists identified 15 possible new species of shrimp-like amphipods, and four possible new species of cnidarians, organisms related to coral, jellyfish and sea anemones.

This would have been much more difficult or impossible with all of that ice to drill through.

[T]he collapse of the ice shelves gave the scientists a unique opportunity to see what had been hidden beneath them; before the collapse, researchers could only peer through holes drilled deep into the ice.

That’s an obvious hardship in the already difficult climate of the Antarctic.

“Keep driving those SUVs,” the lead scientist of the expedition said, adding that if it got much warmer, he could go without his coat and gloves. “Those things get in the way when trying to examine specimens”

Okay, that last part I made up. Interesting report.