Melting Northwest Passage lets Pacific species cross

The Associated Press Posted: Jun 27, 2011 9:54 AM ET

Grey whales still live in the Pacific Ocean, but were hunted to extinction in the Atlantic by the mid-1700s. The one spotted near Israel and Spain last year is believed to have entered the Atlantic Ocean through the Northwest Passage. Associated Press

When a 13-metre grey whale was spotted off the Israeli town of Herzliya last year, scientists came to a startling conclusion: it must have wandered across the normally icebound route above Canada, where warm weather had briefly opened a clear channel three years earlier.
On a microscopic level, scientists also have found plankton in the North Atlantic where it had not existed for at least 800,000 years.
The whale's odyssey and the surprising appearance of the plankton indicates a migration of species through the Northwest Passage, a worrying sign of how global warming is affecting animals and plants in the oceans as well as on land.

'It's a threshold that has been crossed.'—Philip C. Reid, Alister Hardy Foundation for Ocean Science

"It's an indication of the speed of change that is taking place in our world in the present day because of climate change," he said in a telephone interview Friday.
Reid said the last time the world witnessed such a major incursion from the Pacific was 2 million years ago, which had "a huge impact on the North Atlantic," driving some species to extinction as the newcomers dominated the competition for food.
Reid's study of plankton and the research on the whale, co-authored by Aviad Scheinin of the Israel Marine Mammal Research and Assistance Center, are among nearly 300 scientific papers written over the last 13 years that are being synthesized and published this year by Project Clamer, a collaboration of 17 institutes on climate change and the oceans.
Changes in the oceans' chemistry and temperature could have implications for fisheries, as species migrate northward to cooler waters, said Katja Philippart, of the Royal Netherlands Institute of Sea Research who is coordinating the project funded by the European Union.
"We try to put the information on the table for people who have to make decisions. We don't say whether it's bad or good. We say there is a high potential for change," she said.

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