Feathered ghosts of winter seas
tumble via the tapestry,
flecks of white and pearl
skirting squalls
earlier than the blizzard’s blast;
wild whiteouts
washing clear
the ends
of the Earth.
Shaken by the sky’s frozen rage,
sterile cliffs and barren floor
echo with the silence of the winds –
a stilted signal of storms to come back
and those that journey
with out
return.
This poem is impressed by recent research, which has discovered that whole populations of Antarctic seabirds fail to breed attributable to excessive, climate-change-related snowstorms.
Local weather change could cause excessive climate occasions that may be dangerous to wildlife, together with particular person animals and full ecosystems. It is because local weather change will increase the frequency and depth of those occasions. In polar environments, such excessive occasions can embody warmth waves, uncommon concentrations of sea ice, and extreme storms. For instance, despite the fact that Antarctic seabirds resembling snow petrels and south polar skuas, are tailored to harsh circumstances, excessive climate occasions can nonetheless impression their potential to breed and different essential features of their lives. These birds lay their eggs on naked floor, and with sufficient snow, the bottom turns into inaccessible, making it inconceivable for the chicks to outlive.
On this new research, researchers discovered that local weather change brought on by elevated snowfall has led to important declines within the breeding success of a number of Antarctic birds. Svarthamaren and Jutulsessen in Antarctica have a few of the world’s largest Antarctic petrel colonies and are essential nesting websites for snow petrels and south polar skuas. From 1985-2020, there have been as much as 200,000 Antarctic petrel nests, 2,000 snow petrel nests, and over 100 skua nests yearly. Nonetheless, within the 2021-2022 season, researchers have been unable to discover a single south polar skua nest, and the variety of Antarctic petrel and snow petrel nests dropped to nearly zero. The research discovered that the unusually robust, local weather change-induced snowstorms of this yr interfered with the birds’ potential to breed, leading to zero breeding success. The local weather disaster implies that Antarctic excessive climate occasions are prone to grow to be extra frequent and given that there’s clearly already a decline in some essential Antarctic seabird populations, the intensification of those storms might outcome of their extinction.