Arctic Ponds Disappear Due to Global Warming, Scientists Say
Ellesmere Island in Canada as seen in Google Earth
News agency Bloomberg is reporting Arctic Ponds Disappear Due to Global Warming, Scientists Say.
Arctic ponds that date back thousands of years are disappearing as global warming increases evaporation rates, a development that may alter the ecological balance in the frozen north, scientists said.
The researchers at Canada’s Queen’s University and University of Alberta examined two dozen ponds on Ellesmere Island, beginning in 1983. By 2006, they found many of the ponds were drying up over the summer, and others were shrinking.
“It’s clear that it’s warming and drying and the ponds are evaporating much more,” John Smol, professor of geography at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, said in a telephone interview. “The ponds are smaller: Some are completely dry. The changes are happening much faster than we thought and it’s going to start cascading through the ecosystem.”
The Arctic is a massive canary in the coal-mine that is our warming Earth. Every indication so far shows that we are sleepwalking into catastrophe. There is no time for delay, no time for inaction, no time to perfect a “universal” carbon trading system. We have to take two simple steps.
- Remove as much CO2 from the atmosphere as we can, as fast as we can.
- Separate our energy use from the carbon cycle as soon as possible.
This means some pain for the big-coal, big-gas, big-oil industries, and as a consequence that’s pain for the global economy. But we dug ourselves into this hole, and the we simply have to stop digging. — DS
Technorati Tags: Arctic, Canada, climate change, disrupted nature, glaciers, global warming, meltdown
