Resource detail

The Arctic Ocean may seem remote and forbidding, but to birds, whales and other animals, it is a top-notch dining destination. “It is a great place to get food in the summer time, so animals are flying or swimming thousands of miles to get there,” said Dr Kevin R Arrigo, a biological oceanographer at Stanford University, USA. But the menu is changing. Confirming earlier research, scientists have recently reported that global warming is altering the ecology of the Arctic Ocean on a huge scale. The annual production of algae, the base of the food web, increased an estimated 47% between 1997 and 2015, and the ocean is greening up much earlier each year. These changes are likely to have a profound impact for animals further up the food chain, such as birds, seals, polar bears and whales. But scientists still don’t know enough about the biology of the Arctic Ocean to predict what the ecosystem will look like in decades to come. While global warming has affected the whole planet in recent decades, nowhere has been hit harder than the Arctic.