This article straight out of the newspaper, because it was rather a mind opener for those who have not realized some of the concequences caused by excessive emissions into our atmosphere, I decided to share it with everybody.
-Up to 15 new species seen off Antartica-
WASHINGTON — Spindly orange sea stars, fan-finned ice fish and herds of roving sea cucumbers are among the exotic creatures that have been spied off the Antartic coast in an area formerly covered by ice.
This is the first time explorers have been able to catalog wildlife where there used to be two mammoth ice shelves blanketing 3,900 square miles of the Weddell Sea.
The ice shelves, atleast 5,000 years old, collapsed in two stages: one 12 years ago and the other five years ago. Global warming is seen as the culprit, Gauthier Chapelle of the Polar Foundation in Brussels Belgium, said Sunday, after a 10-week voyage of exploration.
“These kind of collapses are expected to happen more,” he said. “What we’re observing here is probably going to hapepn elsewhere around Antarctica.”
In the past 12 years, 5,213 square miles of ice shelving has disintegrated along the Antartic Peninsula, the part of the continent that curves up toward South America and ends some 700 miles from Argentina.
The collapse of the ice shelves has given the scientists a unique oppertunity to see what had been hidden beneath them; before the collapse, researchers could only peer through holes drilled deep into the ice.
Chapelle and other scientists from 14 nations traveled to the area aboard the icebreaking vessel Polarstern in a 10-week voyage to investigate underwater wildlife along the Antartic Peninsula.
Looking down 2,800 feet into the icy water — a comparatively shallow depth — they 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, and 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. They apparently started colonizing the area 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, the scientists said in a statement Sunday.
These specimens will be analyzed to determine whether they in fact are newly discovered species.
Credits to Zabarenko; Journalist
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