I-COOL

The Polar Marine Ecosystems respond to Rapid Climate Change by selective increased population growth, altering species location and mating grounds, and selective population decreasing. The warming climate change melts sea ice – vital to southern aquatic life – which causes a decline in Antarctic life to focus on one point. To give an example, the Adelie penguins that depend on sea ice for mating, food, and survival lost previous sea ice grounds and are losing new sea ice to live. In addition, since the ocean capacity is increasing due to ice meltation, species are now have more room to reproduce, live, and eat, which leads to selective increased productivity rates. However, the significantly smaller life forms that are the key to ocean life – Antarctic krill – are now small enough for phytoplankton to consume; this is disrupting the prior aquatic food chain. To sum up a very large problem in a small sentence, the major increase of sea ice temperature is creating an incredibly massive chain reaction of aquatic, climatic, and global problems.

Seth Martin     (mar3seth@eden.rutgers.edu)

Greetings from Palmer Station Antarctica. This year Alex (veteran from last year), Brian, and myself (Tina) are here for the LTER summer season. Some changes this year are the addition of a third person and a third glider to our group which will hopefully allow us to get even more accomplished. We will be working very closely with Maggie and Dan who are from Hugh Ducklow's group  since we are all sampling the same water and at the same depths. We will also be working closely with Kristen and Jenn who are the Penguin girls from Bill Fraser's group. Together the seven of us form the LTER science group! We have been spending the past week finding all our gear and setting up our respective labs. Today we are hoping will be our first sampling day however we are faced with a very high tide and 20 knot winds. Neither of which yields to successful boating. So instead we play it by ear and hope for a break in the weather.

It hasn't all been hard labor though... we were all lucky enough to go to Torgersen Island which has a couple Adelie penguin colonies on it. It was a beautiful day and quite the experience.