According to a paper issued on Tuesday by U.S. scientists, dead and dying seabirds collected along the beaches of the northern Bering and southern Chukchi seas over the past six years demonstrate how the Arctic’s rapidly changing climate poses a threat to the region’s ecosystems and inhabitants.
Numerous malnourished seabirds, including shearwaters, auklets, and murres, which normally consume plankton, krill, or fish, have been recorded by local people. These seabirds appear to have had difficulties locating sufficient food. According to biologists, the hundreds of disturbed and dead birds represent only a fraction of those that starved.
Since 2017, the Bering Strait region has had many species of seabird extinctions, according to Gay Sheffield, a biologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks based in Nome, Alaska, and co-author of the report. The only shared characteristic is emaciation or hunger.
She stated that the seabirds are struggling due to climate-related ecological disturbances, which can influence the availability and timing of food, as well as a toxic algal bloom and a viral outbreak in the region.
And their plight endangers human populations as well: “Birds are crucial to our region, both economically and nutritionally,” said Sheffield.
The data on seabirds is included in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s annual “Arctic Report Card,” which monitors changes in a region that is warming faster than any other on the planet.
Climate change is fast altering the food chain, according to Don Lyons, a conservation biologist with the National Audubon Society’s Seabird Institute who did not participate in the investigation. Food is not as dependable as it once was in terms of where it may be found at different periods of the year.
While some lean years are inevitable for seabirds, the data reveals a concerning pattern, according to Lyons. The expert added, “It appears that we have passed a tipping point; we have entered a new regime in which phenomena that were once uncommon and uncommon are now regular and frequent.”
Common murres washed ashore on a rough beach in Whittier, Alaska, on Thursday, January 7, 2016. The inability of Arctic seabirds to obtain sufficient food in warmer ocean waters is only one indication of the rapid climate change in the arctic region, which is occurring faster than anyplace else on Earth. Mark Thiessen / AP
The analysis revealed that the Arctic’s annual surface air temperatures were the sixth warmest since records began in 1900, with the last six years constituting the warmest documented period in history. And satellite recordings revealed that broad sections near the North Pole were practically devoid of sea ice for several weeks last summer.
The most recent Arctic Report Card emphasized the continued pattern of seabird deaths, which, according to the report, connects to the six-year trend of rising temperatures. Communities in the northern Bering Sea and southern Chukchi Sea region reported higher-than-expected seabird die-offs for the sixth consecutive year.
As environmental scientists have previously noted, the Arctic continued to warm at a rate more than twice as fast as the rest of the world, with more dramatic changes observed in certain locations and at different times of the year. According to the report, the amount of sea ice recorded this year was similar to the amount observed in 2021, and sea surface temperatures collected across most ice-free regions of the Arctic Ocean increased.
“The area of sea ice was significantly below the long-term average,” said Walt Meier, an expert on sea ice at the University of Colorado Boulder and co-author of the study.
Several kilometers with little or no ice, within a couple hundred kilometers of the North Pole, was the most remarkable thing we observed during the summer, said the researcher.
Peter Marra, a conservation biologist from Georgetown University who was not involved in the paper, stated, “The changes occurring in the Arctic are so rapid and so fundamental.”
Marra stated that seabirds are the proverbial canaries in the coal mines when it comes to indicating broader ecosystem changes, adding, “We must do a much better job of monitoring these sentinel populations.”
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