DEEP DIVING CORMORANT FILMS ITS OWN HUNT

Courtesy of the Wildlife Conservation Society, this footage of an imperial cormorant fitted with a camera on its back as it dives for 40 seconds to ~150 feet (45 meters), hunts for minute on the seafloor, then catches a snakelike fish, which it carries to the surface to eat. 
  
Cool. But hopefully they take that camera off soon. Remember this study in Nature showing that the survival of king penguins wearing small bands on their flippers dropped by 16 percent, and that they produced 39 percent fewer chicks, and how this might have skewed the data on all kinds of research (notably, climate change)?
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• Claire Saraux, Céline Le Bohec, Joël M. Durant, Vincent A. Viblanc, Michel Gauthier-Clerc, + et al. Reliability of flipper-banded penguins as indicators of climate change. Nature 469, 203-206 doi:10.1038/nature09630

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A CENTURY IN THE NORTH

Fourteen extraordinary minutes detailing a hundred years in the Arctic of climate change, war, science, politics, energy, unrealistic optimism, business, and beauty.
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North from Studiocanoe on Vimeo.

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PLENTY MORE FISH IN THE SEA?

Visualization from Information is Beautiful based on data from the paper Hundred Year Decline of North Atlantic Predatory Fishes comparing fish landings in tons per square kilometer in 1900 versus 2000 for popularly eaten fish—bluefin tuna, brill, cod, haddock, hake, halibut, herring, mackerel, pollock, salmon, sea trout, striped bass, sturgeon, turbot, whiting.
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Via Information is Beautiful.

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WAVE BUOY SCULPTURE

A sculpture responding to wave height data recorded by NOAA's buoy 46246 in the North Pacific.
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tele-present water from david bowen on Vimeo.
  

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THE MOTION OF A UNIVERSE

After two weeks hiking in the high Sierra, the speed of this video—set to the words of Nikola Tesla—appealed to me.
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Passing Through from Olafur Haraldsson on Vimeo.

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TRANSIT OF VENUS EXPLAINED

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WAVES

A sculptural ribbon of 3,600 LCD glass tiles animates waveforms of clouds, rain drops, colonies of bacteria, cuttlefish skin, flocking birds, geese, and pulsating black holes.
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Patterned by Nature from Sosolimited on Vimeo.

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A GLOBAL WARMING REFUGE AT EQUATORIAL ISLANDS

Some islands in the bulls'-eye of climate change may dodge the worst thanks to heretofore unknown dynamics between deep currents, upwelling, and rising temperatures.
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Gilbert Island archipelago in the Pacific island nation of Kiribati. Credit: NASA/Aqua Satellite.

  
A new paper in Nature Climate Change reports on an unexpected refuge of cooler water around the equatorial Gilbert Islands—one of three archipelagos of the Pacific island nation of Kiribati (say: KEER-uh-bus).
  
This is good news at a time when when scientists predict that rising ocean temperatures in the equatorial Pacific will wreak havoc (coral bleaching, coral disease) on coral reef ecosystems by the end of the century. 
  
The new study shows that climate change could cause ocean currents to operate in a surprising way to mitigate warming near a handful of islands on the equator... which may then become isolated refuges for corals and fish.
    

The three archipelagos of the Pacific island nation of Kiribati straddle the Equator. Map based on: TUBS via Wikimedia Commons.

  
The dynamics of this cooler-water refuge include:
  

1. Equatorial trade winds pushing a surface current, the Equatorial Countercurrent, from east to west
2. A swift Equatorial Undercurrent flowing below the Equatorial Countercurrent in the opposite direction, west to east, at 100-200 meters (328-656 feet)

Where the Equatorial Undercurrent encounters an island, its flow is deflected upward on the island's western flank, carrying its cooler nutrient-rich water to the sunlit surface and creating localized areas of greater ocean productivity.

You can see the dynamics of this in the map and graph below showing chlorophyll levels—a marker of phytoplankton and hence marine productivity—across the equatorial Pacific. The red in the map view indicates highest chlorophyll / phytoplankton / marine productivity.

Credit: Kristopher B. Karnauskas and Anne L. Cohen. Nature Climate Change. DOI:10.1038/nclimate1499.

    
Clearly, the most productive waters occur in the eastern tropical Pacific, where the Equatorial Undercurrent drives up against the Galapagos Islands to create huge upwelling.
  
Chlorophyll quantities then dwindle rapidly as you move west... until the anomalous red signature marking the outlines of the Gilbert Islands of Kiribati seen inside the white-dotted rectangle. The islands are not shown in the map view, just their chlorophyll signatures.
  
Co-author Anne Cohen at WHOI says:
  

"Global models predict significant temperature increases in the central tropical Pacific over the next few decades, but in truth conditions can be highly variable across and around a coral reef island. To predict what the coral reef will experience in global climate change, we have to use high-resolution models, not global models."

Coral reef of the equatorial Pacific. Credit: USFWS.

The models predict:
  

• That as air temperatures rise and equatorial trade winds weaken, the Pacific surface current will also weaken by 15 percent by the end of the century.
• But the then-weaker surface current will also impose less friction and drag on the EUC, so this deeper current will actually strengthen by 14 percent.

 
The high-resolution models developed by  Kristopher Karnauskas, also at WHOI, and Cohen, suggest the amount of upwelling will actually increase by about 50 percent around the Gilbert Islands, to reduce the rate of warming waters there by about 0.7°C (1.25°F) per century.
  
From the paper:

In the central Pacific, home to one of the largest marine protected areas and fishery regions in the global tropics, sea surface temperatures are projected to increase by 2.8 °C by the end of this century. Of critical concern is that marine protected areas may not provide refuge from the anticipated rate of large-scale warming, which could exceed the evolutionary capacity of coral and their symbionts to adapt. Combining high-resolution satellite measurements, an ensemble of global climate models and an eddy-resolving regional ocean circulation model, we show that warming and productivity decline around select Pacific islands will be mitigated by enhanced upwelling associated with a strengthening of the equatorial undercurrent. Enhanced topographic upwelling will act as a negative feedback, locally mitigating the surface warming. At the Gilbert Islands, the rate of warming will be reduced by 0.7±0.3 °C or 25 ± 9% per century, or an overall cooling effect comparable to the local anomaly for a typical El Niño, by the end of this century. As the equatorial undercurrent is dynamically constrained to the Equator, only a handful of coral reefs stand to benefit from this equatorial island effect. Nevertheless, those that do face a lower rate of warming, conferring a significant advantage over neighbouring reef systems. If realized, these predictions help to identify potential refuges for coral reef communities from anticipated climate changes of the twenty-first century.

  

A bathymetric view of the Phoenix Islands group of the Pacific islands nation of Kiribati. Credit: Phoenix Islands Protected Area.

    
As an interesting aside, in 2006 Kiribati created the Phoenix Islands Protected Area (PIPA) to the east of the Gilbert Islands. In 2008 they doubled its size to make it the world's largest marine protected area. (Since then the Chagos Marine Reserve in the Indian Ocean has surpassed PIPA in size.)

At 410,500 square kilometers (158,453 square miles), about the size of California, PIPA preserves one of the Earth's last intact oceanic coral archipelago ecosystems, complete with eight coral atolls, two submerged reef systems, underwater sea mounts, and abundant marine and bird life.
 
This is a truly phenomenal accomplishment. 
  
But if the Gilbert Islands are destined to become one of the few places where coral reef biodiversity is able to hang on in the coming century, then maybe we should begin thinking about giving those waters stronger protections too.

 

An atoll of Kiribati. Via Flickr.

The paper:
   

• Kristopher B. Karnauskas & Anne L. Cohen. Equatorial refuge amid tropical warming. Nature Climate Change (2012) DOI:10.1038/nclimate1499

  

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IT'S TRUE, THE OCEAN REALLY IS GOOD FOR US

Credit: praecepitum via Flickr.

A study from the European Centre for Environment and Human Health followed 2,750 people in England over two years and found that most enjoy the seaside better than the countryside or urban parks.

And while all outdoor places are refreshing, the greatest pleasure comes from exercising beside the sea... regardless of a person's age or home environment or who they're travelling with or if they're alone.

The researchers suggest several possibilities (or all of them!):

• People respond positively to the way light plays on the water or the sounds of the sea
• We have social or cultural expectations about the benefits of the seaside
• We have individual associations, like happy childhood memories

H/T the BBC. 

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A YEAR IN THE LIFE OF PENGUINS

Time-lapse video of penguin colonies shows challenges of snow and cold.
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Two penguin rookeries in Antarctica appear in time-lapse over the course of a year. The footage was shot by researchers from the Zoological Society of London and the University of Oxford:
  

By adapting existing camera technology and using time-lapse photography, we are trialling the development of a new monitoring array for the southern polar region. By monitoring remotely, we hope to be able to ask new questions about the response of Antarctic penguins to their changing world.  

Cameras capture daily images of the movements of the penguins, allowing us to collect data on the timings of penguin life cycles at different locations, such as their time of arrival to breed and chick fledging. 

 
The first colony on the video is of gentoo penguins at Brown Bluff on the Antarctic Peninsula... Penguins come and go, then mostly go. The whiteout of winter snows buries the camera. The snow melts, penguins return to establish nests as new snow falls and melts.
    

Gentoo penguins with chicks. Credit: Liam Quinn via Wikimedia Commons.

The second colony in the video is of king penguins at the much more populated Salisbury Plain on South Georgia Island, where about 200,000 birds gather to nest... You can see that as winter approaches, and as the parents go off to fish for them, the brown woolly chicks huddle together for warmth in groups known as crèches.
  

King penguins with chicks. Credit: Ben Tubby via Wikimedia Commons.

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THE FATE OF OLD SEA ICE

A few years ago sea ice covered a quarter of the Arctic Ocean. Now: 2 percent.
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Aerial view of the edge of the sea ice in Nunavut, Canada. Credit: Doc Searls via Wikimedia Commons .

  
The latest stats on 2012's sea ice in the Arctic are out from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). The winter of 2012 was not the lowest year since satellite monitoring began 34 years ago—but it was well below the average.
  
And the trend continues downward... as you can see in the graph below showing March sea ice extent since 1979.
  

Credit: National Snow and Ice Data Center.

  
Worse is the fate of old sea ice. 
  
Ice older than four years used to make up about a quarter of the wintertime sea ice cover in the Arctic. It now constitutes only 2 percent. From the NSIDC page:
  

Ice age data this year show that the ice cover remains much thinner than it was in the past, with a high proportion of first-year ice, which is thin and vulnerable to summer melt. After the record low minimum of 2007 the Arctic lost a significant amount of older, thicker ice, both from melting and from movement of ice out of the Arctic the following winter. In the last few years, the melt and export of old ice was less extreme than in 2007 and 2008, and multiyear ice started to re-grow, with second and third-year ice increasing over the last three years.

 

Arctic sea ice. Credit: Pink floyd88 a via Wikimedia Commons.

  
After the near-record summertime melt of 2011 there was a decline in two-year-old ice. And although some thicker three- and four-year-old ice managed to survive, the oldest, thickest ice—the stuff more than four years old—continued to decline. 

   

Credit: National Snow and Ice Data Center courtesy J. Maslanik and M. Tschudi, University of Colorado.

  
In the map above you can see how much of 2012's winter sea ice was new ice—just formed this year (purple). And how there's virtually nothing left of the old sea ice that was born five or more years ago (white).
  

Credit: National Snow and Ice Data Center courtesy J. Maslanik and M. Tschudi, University of Colorado.

  
The graph above shows the trend since 1983... how much old ice there used to be and what an endangered species it is now.

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CRAAZY CURRENTS

World Ocean currents. Click for larger view. Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio.

NASA/Goddard has stunning images up at their Scientific Visualization Studio showing sea surface currents colored by sea surface temperature data. From the explainer:

This visualization was produced using NASA/JPL's computational model called Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean, Phase II or ECCO2. ECCO2 is high resolution model of the global ocean and sea-ice. ECCO2 attempts to model the oceans and sea ice to increasingly accurate resolutions that begin to resolve ocean eddies and other narrow-current systems which transport heat and carbon in the oceans.The ECCO2 model simulates ocean flows at all depths, but only surface flows are used in this visualization.

Pacific Ocean currents. Click for larger view. Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio.

Here's the insanely beautiful eddies of my home ocean, the Pacific. Note the superhighways of the Equatorial currents that run so much of Earth's climate via the El Niño/La Niña-Southern Oscillation. And note the powerful Kuroshio Current off Japan (upper left) currently carrying that nation's tsunami debris towards North America.

North Atlantic Ocean currents. Click for larger view. Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio.

  

In this view of the North Atlantic you can see the data-rich regions—the places where oceanographers have been cranking out the studies for decades—throughout the Caribbean and up the Gulf Stream through to the North Atlantic Drift en route to Europe.

  

Indian Ocean currents. Click for larger view. Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio.

What pops for me in this Indian Ocean image is the crazy interference patterns around the Cape of Good Hope (bottom left quadrant) where the Benguela and the powerful Agulhas currents spin up some stuff known as mesoscale eddies... and the way those ripple through the system into the Antarctic Circumpolar Current.

The movement in the animation is subtle and hypnotic.

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MARINE SANCTUARY REALLY HELPS RARE DOLPHINS

Hector's dolphin. Credit: James Shook via Wikimedia Commons.

  
A new study provides the first empirical evidence that a marine protected area (MPA) has robustly improved the survival of a marine mammal. In this case, one of the world's most endangered marine mammals, the Hector's dolphin (Cephalorhynchus hectori) of New Zealand.
  
The IUCN Red List describes the problems facing this diminutive cetacean:
  

This species is considered to be Endangered due to an ongoing and projected decline of greater than 50% over 3 generations (approx. 39 years)... Hector’s dolphin has the most limited range of any marine cetacean other than the vaquita (Phocoena sinus)... The main cause of population decline is ongoing bycatch in [gillnet and trawl] fisheries.

  
Concerned for the future of this rare species (population: 7,270 individuals), New Zealand in 1988 established the Banks Peninsula Marine Mammal Sanctuary in 1,170-square-kilometers (451-square-miles) of waters off the South Island. 

Banks Peninsula, South Island, New Zealand. Credit: NASA Astronaut Photo ISS013-E-67242.

The research, ongoing since 1986, involved identifying 462 individual Hector's dolphins through photographs and then analyzing the photographic re-sightings using a Bayesian mark-recapture technique. The team applied a population model to assess the impact of the MPA on the dolphins.

Their results show that since the designation of the sanctuary, the Hector's dolphins' survival rate has increased by 5.4 percent: 

• From a decline of ~6 percent per year
• Now slowed to a rate of decline of ~1 percent per year

As good as that sounds, the researchers were surprised survival rates hadn't increased further, since they expected the establishment of the MPA to solve the problem entirely.
    

Hector's dolphin. Credit: David Searle via Flickr.

Instead they discovered the dolphins don't spend the whole year in the sanctuary. Co-author Liz Slooten tells me:

Their distribution with respect to depth and distance offshore changes. In winter they are almost evenly distributed with respect to depth and distance offshore. In summer they are strongly concentrated close to shore. This means that in summer about 80% of the population is inside the sanctuary and protected. In winter this drops to only about 40%. Too many dolphins are still being caught in fishing nets to allow the population to stabilise, let alone recover from the massive decline they've suffered over the last three decades.

"The MPA hasn't quite yet 'saved' the dolphins," says Slooten, "but it's been a major step in the right direction. The take home message is that size matters. Marine Protected Areas work, but they have to be large enough in order to be effective."

The paper in early view at the Journal of Applied Ecology:

• Andrew M Gormley, Elisabeth Slooten, Steve Dawson, Richard J Barker, Will Rayment, Sam du Fresne and Stefan Brager (2012). First evidence that Marine Protected Areas can work for marine mammals. Jour. App. Ecol. DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2664.2012.02121.x

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ONLY GIRL SHEARWATERS FLY TO FRANCE

Puffinus shearwater. Credit: Jofre Ferrer via Flickr. 

  
The Balearic shearwaters (Puffinus mauretanicus) who breed on the Spanish Balearic Islands don't go far when they migrate... out the Strait of Gibraltar then north to summering grounds off the Atlantic coasts of Portugal and France.
  
Yet, curiously, only the females go to France. 
  
Perhaps because of these longer migrations, they also spend longer away from their breeding grounds than the males: 

• Median duration of time away for females: 91 days
• Median duration of time away for males: 83 days

Credit: Tim Guilford et al. PLoS ONE. DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0033753.

These are the findings of a team of researchers who tagged 26 shearwaters with miniature geolocation trackers and followed their annual movements from the Balearic Islands. The results are published in a new paper in PLoS ONE.
  
You can see in the maps above the routes of the individual birds, each with its own color track:
  

• Inset map shows where all the birds occurred statistically half the time throughout the year.
• Larger maps shows where all the birds occurred statistically half the time on migration to and from their breeding islands.
• The colored circles mark where four birds made trips back into eh Atlantic after their migrations.
• The red symbol is the position of the breeding colony at Sa Cella cave on Mallorca.

  

Longline hooks. Credit: Isaac Wedin via Flickr.

The gender-specific migrations are more than a curiosity. They're vitally important knowledge since Balearic shearwaters are Europe's only critically endangered seabird. From the IUCN Red List:
  

This species has a tiny breeding range and a small population [known breeding population: ~3,200 pairs] which is undergoing an extremely rapid population decline owing to a number of threats, in particular predation at breeding colonies by introduced mammals [cats, genets, rats, rabbits] and at-sea mortality as a result of interactions with commercial fisheries [hooked and drowned on longlines]. Population models predict an extremely rapid decline over three generations (54 years), qualifying the species as Critically Endangered.

  

Balearic shearwater. Credit: Roger Montserrat via Flickr.

Obviously if you have a large proportion of the females flocking and feeding in one location then the entire species becomes susceptible to mass mortality fishing events like the one that killed ~50 birds off Spain in 1999-2000. As the authors note:
  

[F]or approximately ¼ of the year, a large percentage of the world's population of breeding birds will be vulnerable to [fisheries] by-catch in these two core areas within the territorial waters of Portugal and France.    

      
The paper:

• Guilford T , Wynn R , McMinn M , Rodríguez A , Fayet A , et al. (2012) Geolocators Reveal Migration and Pre-Breeding Behaviour of the Critically Endangered Balearic Shearwater Puffinus mauretanicus. PLoS ONE 7(3): e33753. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0033753

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BIODIVERSITY UNIVERSE

BIOdiversity from tresvampiros on Vimeo.

Great animated short explaining biodiversity made for the Humboldt Institute in Bogotá, Colombia (my birthplace).

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WISE SKY

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA.

  
In a great mapping milestone, NASA's WISE (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) space telescope has compiled this mosaic image of the entire sky. 
  
That's more than 2.7 million images taken at four infrared wavelengths of light for a total of more than 15 trillion bytes of data in just over two years. 

As for what you're looking at, here's the WISE page description:
  

This map is centered on the Milky Way Galaxy. The plane of the Galaxy runs along the equator, and the center of the Galaxy is at the center of the map, where projection distortions are minimal. The distortions are most pronounced at the edges of the map. The right and left edges of this oval shape are the same location in the sky.

  

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA.

  
There are 560 million objects in this view—many seen for the first time—stars, galaxies, planets, asteroids, and more:
  

WISE observations have led to numerous discoveries, including the elusive, coolest class of stars. Astronomers hunted for these failed stars, called "Y-dwarfs," for more than a decade. Because they have been cooling since their formation, they don't shine in visible light and could not be spotted until WISE mapped the sky with its infrared vision

 

And here's a zoomable version of the WISE map so you can boldly go where no one has gone before. Click here for humongous version.

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CRAB GETS CRAFTY

Hermit crab with anemone n shell. Credit: mirtai via Flickr.

My recent hermit crab post included a video of hermits trying on new homes, and included the the way some defend their shells with stinging anemones (above).
  
But I also found myself wondering what will become of hermit crabs in a world of increasing ocean acidity and dwindling seashells? (You can read more about that in my latest article in OnEarth magazine.)
  

Credit: Courtesy of the NOAA Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory. 

In the above image you can see the fate of a shell dissolving over 45 days in acidified water. 

   

Now via Discover Magazine I see this interesting photo (below) of a nude hermit crab donning an anemone: 

Greg Rouse and colleagues found this critter during an expedition off the coast of Costa Rica in 2010. The area is lacking in large snail shells, says Dr. Rouse, and there has been a previous report of this species, Parapagurus foraminosus, covered by an anemone.

  

Credit: Greg Rouse, Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego.

Crabs—survivors since at least the early Jurassic—are crafty!

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NORTHWEST PASSAGE OPENS FOR BOWHEAD WHALES

Bowhead whale. Via.

  
A new paper in Biology Letters reports on two satellite-tagged bowhead whales from different oceans meeting in the ice-free waters of the Northwest Passage in September 2010. 
  
One whale was from West Greenland. The other from Alaska. Their paths crossed in the Parry Channel in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago (maps, below). 
  
From the paper:
  

It is not known what attracted the whales to this area, given the region has relatively low marine production in autumn compared with other known bowhead whale feeding areas.

   

Bowhead whale bones on ceremonial ground, Point Hope, Alaska. Credit: rnoblin via Flickr.

This was not the first times whales from different waters have met in an ice-free Northwest Passage. From the paper:
  

During the commercial whaling period (i.e. pre-1900), several harpoon heads of Atlantic origin were discovered in bowhead whales harvested in the Chukchi Sea/western Arctic, but this information was largely dismissed as anecdotal by scientists. 

  
Further evidence appears in the genetic record:
  

Recent genetic studies compared DNA of whales from Foxe Basin, Canada to whales from Alaska and suggest genetic mixing, although results are based on a small sample size from a highly segregated population. The lack of genetic differentiation between whales in the Pacific and the Atlantic, acknowledging that samples are taken several thousand years apart, suggests that some exchange of individuals occurred between whales in Svalbard and Alaska. 

  

Credit: Mads Peter Heide-Jørgensen, et al. Biol Lett. DOI:100.1098/rsbl.2011.0731. 

The maps show the individual tracks of the two whales from late spring through early autumn. The inset map shows where they overlapped. From the paper:
  

The Northwest Passage with tracks of four bowhead whales and extent of sea ice with greater than 50% concentration (white fields). (a) Track of a whale tagged on 4 May 2002 in West Greenland and ice extent on 20 September 2002. (b) Track of a whale tagged in Alaska on 12 May 2006 and sea ice extent on 8 August 2006. (c) Track of a whale tagged on 24 May 2010 in Alaska, one tagged on 15 April 2010 in West Greenland, and sea ice extent on 14 September 2010. The insert shows the area where whales occurred together in 2010. The whale from Alaska was present in Viscount Melville Sound between 19 August and 18 September while the whale from Greenland was present from 11 to 28 September.

  

1980: Sea ice coverage 1 Nov-31 Jan. Credit: NASA Earth Observatory.

2012: Sea ice coverage 1 Nov-31 Jan. Red star marks approximately where the two whales met in 2010. Credit: NASA Earth Observatory.

These latest images posted by NASA's Earth Observatory give you a sense of how the passage has opened up in the last three decades for whales... and presumably for others too. I marked (red star) approximately where the two whales met in 2010.
  
The authors conclude:
  

Given recent rates of sea ice loss, climate change may eliminate geographical divisions between stocks of bowhead whales and open new areas that have not been inhabited by bowhead whales for millennia (e.g. North of Greenland and north of the Canadian Archipelago).

The documented movements of bowhead whales in the Northwest Passage are perhaps an early sign that other marine organisms have begun exchanges between the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans across the Arctic. Some of these exchanges may be harder to detect than bowhead whales, but the ecological impacts could be more significant should the ice-free Arctic become a dispersal corridor between the two oceans.

Foxe Basin Bowhead Whales from Stephen Ambruzs on Vimeo.

The open-access ♥ paper:
  

• Mads Peter Heide-Jørgensen, Kristin L. Laidre, Lori T. Quakenbush, and John J. Citta. The Northwest Passage opens for bowhead whales. Biol Lett. DOI:10.1098/rsbl.2011.0731.

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