What changes when you warm the Antarctic Ocean just 1 degree? Lots

"I was quite surprised," says Gail Ashton of the British

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Antarctic Survey and Smithsonian Environmental Research Center. "I wasn't expecting a significant observable difference in communities warmed by just 1°C in the Antarctic. I have spent most of my career working in temperate climates where communities experience much greater temperature fluctuations and wasn't expecting such a response to just 1°C of change."

Predicting how organisms and whole communities will respond to climate change in the future remains a major challenge. So, Ashton and her colleagues decided to actually warm an area of seabed around the Rothera Research Station and watch what happened. They deployed heated settlement panels to warm a thin layer of water by 1°C or 2°C above the ambient temperature. Those increases in global temperature are expected within the next 50 and 100 years, respectively.

The experiment showed that with a 1°C increase in temperature, a single pioneer species of bryozoan (Fenestrulina rugula) took off. That one species ultimately dominated the community, driving a reduction in overall species diversity and evenness within two months. Individuals of a marine worm, Romanchella perrieri, also grew to an average size 70 percent larger than those under ambient conditions, the researchers report.

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-08-antarctic-ocean-degree-lots.html#jCp