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Retreating Ice Leaves Glacial Species On The Rocks

11.03.2012

The rapid retreat of glaciers is one of the most visible signs of Earth’s changing climate, but the disappearance of the ice is altering far more than physical landscape. An analysis suggests that species that live in the streams and rivers that flow from melting glaciers could begin to vanish when just half of the glacial cover in a region is lost. “We had no idea that so many small invertebrates were restricted to this kind of environment,” says Dean Jacobsen, a freshwater biologist at the University of Copenhagen and one of the authors of the study, published in Nature Climate Change. The finding comes from a team that looked at the diversity of insect larvae in water at 103 sites fed by glaciers in the Ecuadorian Andes, the European Alps and Alaska’s coastal mountains. The researchers compared the number of species to the percentage of glacier cover in the catchment area. In areas with high glacial cover, they predict, several species will start to disappear when cover drops to 50%. If the glaciers in all three regions were to disappear, between 9 and 14 species would be totally lost, representing 11% of the diversity in Ecuador, 16% in the Alps and 38% in Alaska.

Photo (c) simonlong / Flickr