Sunday, February 17, 2008

If it's not the crabs, it's the lawyers

I mean sharks:

Boston, MA (AHN) - If the present trend of global warming continues, the marine life in Antarctica will be at risk from an invasion of sharks, crabs and other predators, biologists have warned. Expressing their concerns at the annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the biologists warned that the presence of sharks in the Antarctica could prove devastating to its underwater ecosystem.

Since the temperature of Antarctica's surrounding waters remain at the freezing point, they become too cold for sharks and other fish living in the vast continent's seas. This makes the Antarctic seafloor occupied mainly by relatively soft-bodied, slow-moving invertebrates.

[snip]
If this happens, the presence of sharks would completely change the ecology of the Antarctic underwater community. In the last 50 years, sea surface temperatures around Antarctica have risen by 1 to 2C, which is more than twice the global average. This has lead to the presence of crabs in the waters for the first time in ages. This will disrupt the composition of the archaic marine communities scientists said.

Professor Cheryl Wilga of the University of Rhode Island (URI), U.S. said, "Sharks are going to arrive in Antarctica as long as the warming trend continues, a bit more slowly than crabs - crabs are going to get there first,"

"But once they do get there they are capable of eating the organisms that live there."
Nice. Not only do we wreck up the planet and melt the polar ice caps, we get to watch all the species disappear, one by one by one.

Update 2/18:

Starting with polar bears (and denied by the US Senate: U.S. Senate Report Debunks Polar Bear Extinction Fears )

And now penguins.

Update 2/20: Hipparchia in comments noted the site United States Senate Environment and Public Works Committee is connected to Senator Inhofe, a rabid global warming denier.

2 comments:

hipparchia said...

inhofe, one of the republicans on that senate environment committee, is a global warming denier of the first water. scientists and other rational people are working diligently to counter as many of inhofe's statements.

ellroon said...

Thanks for the links, hipparchia! I'm scampering off to add to the post. Appreciate the heavy lifting so I'll look more ... uh... scholarly!