In The Guardian van 7 juni staat een uitgebreid artikel over de “het einde van de Noordpool, zoals we het nu kennen”.
In het artikel wordt duidelijk gemaakt met wat voor enorme snelheid het arctische zee-ijs verdwijnt. Daarnaast wordt aandacht geschonken aan de betekenis van het zee-ijs voor de biodiversiteit en wordt verondersteld dat het ijs-ecosyteem bijdraagt aan het opnemen van CO2 in de oceaan.
Enkele citaten:
“Researchers are discovering that the floes (‘ijsschotsen’ HS) are home to an extraordinary variety and abundance of life, even during the four-month darkness of Arctic winter.”
“Together, millions of these species form an oceanic pump, says Mattias Cape, a biological oceanographer with the University of Washington. Phytoplankton help the oceans produce more oxygen than all the world’s forests. They also sequester carbon dioxide more effectively because copepods and the bigger creatures that eat them take the gas down to the depths, where it can be stored for hundreds of years. Nowhere is this pump more effective than near the poles – the zooplankton here are bigger, so they sink deeper.”
En over de IJswalvis:
“The bowhead whale, for example, can live for 200 years, so some are having to adapt to a modern climate with faculties developed in the Georgian age,” Koopman says. “Things are moving far too rapidly for them to keep up. Perhaps small invertebrates can cope with year to year because their breeding cycles come round more quickly. But for a 200-year-old whale, how can they change that fast? Things are so accelerated.”