In this Feb. 21, 2011 file photo, a tail of a gray whale surfaces at the Ojo de Liebre lagoon in Guerrero Negro, Mexico. When a 43-foot (13-meter) gray whale was spotted off the Israeli town of Herzliya last year, scientists came to a startling conclusion: it must have wandered across the normally icebound route above Canada, where warm weather had briefly opened a clear channel three years earlier. On a microscopic level, scientists also have found plankton in the North Atlantic where it had not existed for at least 800,000 years. The whale’s odyssey and the surprising appearance of the plankton indicates a migration of species through the Northwest Passage, a worrying sign of how global warming is affecting animals and plants in the oceans as well as on land. (AP Photo/Guillermo Arias, file)

AMSTERDAM
(AP) — When a 43-foot (13-meter) gray whale was spotted off the Israeli
town of Herzliya last year, scientists came to a startling conclusion:
it must have wandered across the normally icebound route above Canada,
where warm weather had briefly opened a clear channel three years
earlier.

On
a microscopic level, scientists also have found plankton in the North
Atlantic where it had not existed for at least 800,000 years.

The
whale’s odyssey and the surprising appearance of the plankton indicates
a migration of species through the Northwest Passage, a worrying sign
of how global warming is affecting animals and plants in the oceans as
well as on land.

“The
implications are enormous. It’s a threshold that has been crossed,”
said Philip C. Reid, of the Alister Hardy Foundation for Ocean Science
in Plymouth, England.

“It’s
an indication of the speed of change that is taking place in our world
in the present day because of climate change,” he said in a telephone
interview Friday.

Reid
said the last time the world witnessed such a major incursion from the
Pacific was 2 million years ago, which had “a huge impact on the North
Atlantic,” driving some species to extinction as the newcomers dominated
the competition for food.

Reid’s
study of plankton and the research on the whale, co-authored by Aviad
Scheinin of the Israel Marine Mammal Research and Assistance Center, are
among nearly 300 scientific papers written over the last 13 years that
are being synthesized and published this year by Project Clamer, a
collaboration of 17 institutes on climate change and the oceans.

Changes
in the oceans’ chemistry and temperature could have implications for
fisheries, as species migrate northward to cooler waters, said Katja
Philippart, of the Royal Netherlands Institute of Sea Research who is
coordinating the project funded by the European Union.

“We
try to put the information on the table for people who have to make
decisions. We don’t say whether it’s bad or good. We say there is a high
potential for change,” she said.

The
Northwest Passage, the route through the frigid archipelago from Alaska
across northern Canada, has been ice-free from one end to the other
only twice in recorded history, in 1998 and 2007. But the ice pack is
retreating farther and more frequently during the summers.

Plankton
that had previously been found only in Atlantic sea bed cores from
800,000 years ago appeared in the Labrador Sea in 1999 — and then in
massive numbers in the Gulf of St. Lawrence two years later. Now it has
established itself as far south as the New York coast, Reid said.

The
highly endangered gray whale sighted off the Israeli coast in May 2010
belonged to a species that was hunted to extinction in the Atlantic by
the mid-1700s. The same animal — identified by unique markings on its
fluke, or tail fin — appeared off the Spanish coast 22 days later, and
has not been reported seen since.

Though
it was difficult to draw conclusions from one whale, the researchers
said its presence in the Mediterranean “coincides with a shrinking of
Arctic Sea ice due to climate change and suggests that climate change
may allow gray whales to re-colonize the North Atlantic.”

That
may be good for the whales, but other aspects of the ice melt could be
harmful to the oceans’ biosystems, the scientists warn.

Plankton
is normally the bottom of the marine food chain, but some are more
nutritious than others. Plankton changes have been blamed for the
collapse of some fish stocks and threats to fish-eating birds in the
North Sea, the studies show.

The
migration of a solitary whale and two species of plankton is not of
much concern so far, Reid said. “It’s the potential for further ones to
come through if the Arctic opens. That’s the key message.”

SOURCE: The Associated Press