World's Largest Lake Warming Rapidly -
Scientists
US: May 1, 2008
NEW YORK - Siberia's Lake Baikal has warmed faster than global air
temperatures over the past 60 years, which could put animals unique to the
world's largest lake in jeopardy, US and Russian scientists said.
The lake has warmed 1.21 degrees Celsius (2.18 degrees Fahrenheit) since
1946 due to climate change, almost three times faster than global air
temperatures, according to a paper by the scientists to be published next
month in the journal "Global Change Biology."
"The whole food web could shift," Marianne Moore, a biology professor at
Wellesley College in Massachusetts and one of the authors of the paper, said
in an interview. The frigid lake, which holds 20 percent of the world's
freshwater, boasts 2,500 species, most of them found nowhere else, such as
the world's only exclusively freshwater seal.
In potentially bad news for that animal, the paper found that the lake's
annual days of ice cover had fallen an average of 18 days over the last 100
years and could drop two weeks to two months more by the end of the century.
The findings could foreshadow the vulnerability of smaller lakes to global
warming because Baikal's great volume of water had been thought to protect
it from rising temperatures, the paper said.
Moore said Baikal's seal, which raises its pups on the ice, could suffer
because the animal has several onshore predators. If ice caves the pups are
raised in melt, Asian crows could also eat the pups, she said.
Changes in the food cycle have already been seen. Numbers of multicellular
zooplankton, which normally live in warmer waters, have increased 335
percent since 1946, while numbers of chlorophyll have risen 300 percent
since 1979, it said.
In addition, the number of diatoms, which live under the ice and later die
and become food for tiny organisms living in the lake's depths, could fall,
Moore said. "Ice recession may have a greater effect than the rising
temperatures," she said.
Story by Timothy Gardner
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
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