Skip Navigation


ICES Journal of Marine Science: Journal du Conseil Advance Access originally published online on February 7, 2008
ICES Journal of Marine Science: Journal du Conseil 2008 65(3):296-301; doi:10.1093/icesjms/fsn008
This Article
Right arrow Full Text
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow All Versions of this Article:
65/3/296    most recent
fsn008v1
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to My Personal Archive
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Pielou, E. C.
PubMed
Right arrow Articles by Pielou, E. C.
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us  
What's this?

© 2008 International Council for the Exploration of the Sea. Published by Oxford Journals. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Plankton, from the last ice age to the year 3007

E. C. Pielou

335 Pritchard Road, Comox, BC, Canada V9M 2Y8

tel: +1 250 3391780; fax: +1 250 3395855; e-mail: pielouec{at}uniserve.com

Pielou, E. C. 2008. Plankton, from the last ice age to the year 3007. – ICES Journal of Marine Science, 65: 296–301.

Climate forcing of the environment and biota has been happening since time immemorial, human forcing only for the past 200 years or so. This paper considers, first, climatic changes over the past 30 000 years, as indicated by plankton and their effects on plankton. Only fossilizable plankton can be observed: principally foraminifera, radiolaria, and pteropods in the zooplankton, and their food, principally coccolithophores, diatoms, and dinoflagellate cysts, in the phytoplankton. The soft-bodied zooplankton species—especially copepods—that lived with them can only be inferred. Large, abrupt climate changes took place, aided by positive feedback. Second, this paper attempts to predict how human forcing in the form of anthropogenic climate change is likely to affect marine ecosystems in the future. Past predictions have underestimated the speed at which warming is actually happening: positive feedback has been unexpectedly strong. Thus, the melting of snow and ice, by reducing the earth's albedo, has increased the amount of solar energy absorbed. Also, warming of the surface (water and land) has caused outgassing of methane from buried clathrates (hydrates), and methane is a strong greenhouse gas. Currently, predictions emphasize one or the other of two contrasted alternatives: abrupt cooling caused by a shutdown of the thermohaline circulation (the "ocean conveyor") or abrupt warming caused by copious outgassing of methane. Both arguments (the former from oceanographers and the latter from geophysicists) are equally persuasive, and I have chosen to explore the methane alternative, because I am familiar with an area (the Beaufort Sea and Mackenzie Delta) where outgassing has recently (2007) been detected and is happening now: in the Arctic Ocean and the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, where disappearance of the ice will affect currents, temperature, thermocline, salinity, upwelling, and nutrients, with consequent effects on the zooplankton.

Keywords: Canada, ice age, palaeoecology, plankton, time-series, trends

Received 11 July 2007; accepted 9 November 2007; advance access publication 7 February 2008.


Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us    What's this?




Disclaimer:
Please note that abstracts for content published before 1996 were created through digital scanning and may therefore not exactly replicate the text of the original print issues. All efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, but the Publisher will not be held responsible for any remaining inaccuracies. If you require any further clarification, please contact our Customer Services Department.