- Until now their deaths have defied explanation. What
caused hundreds of seemingly healthy seabirds to perish on the North Sea
has baffled scientists since the discovery of their corpses on the Norfolk
coastline this spring. Fears of a major pollution incident such as an oil
slick were quickly dispelled.
-
- But now the mystery is close to being solved and the
answer has stunned ornithologists: the North Sea is heating up at an alarming
rate. The broody expanse of water, famous for its violent storms and freak
waves, is slowly being transformed.
-
- Using the oldest maritime data in the world, scientists
have found that climate change is ridding the North Sea of its precious
stocks of plankton, the microscopic organisms on which all life in the
sea depends. As the very building blocks of the food chain disappear, fish
and the birds that feed on them, such as the puffin and guillemot, are
starving to death in what has been their natural home for thousands of
years.
-
- New research from the Sir Alistair Hardy Foundation for
Ocean Science in Plymouth, which has been monitoring plankton around the
British Isles for more than 70 years, reveals that the North Sea is undergoing
a major 'regime shift'.
-
- Foundation director Dr Chris Reid said: 'What's happening
in the North Sea is it's becoming more like the east coast of Spain. As
temperatures get warmer, we are starting to see a pattern that is more
typical of what you might see in the Mediterranean.'
-
- Their concern is supported by another set of findings
detailing how the sudden change of the North Sea is impacting on Britain's
sea birds, many of whom breed in internationally recognised sites.
-
- Seabird colonies off the Yorkshire coast and the Shetland
Islands are headed for their worst breeding season on record. So far a
number of colonies have failed to produce any young at all. Starving chicks
screeching for food from their cliff nests along the eastern coast of Britain
are an increasingly common sight to alarmed bird-watchers. In the Shetlands
alone, thousands of kittiwakes and guillemots, regarded as one of the hardiest
of species, have failed to return to old nesting sites.
-
- Martin Heubeck, a researcher from Aberdeen University
who has studied seabirds on Shetland for 28 years, said: 'There just isn't
enough food. Until now the North Sea has offered an ideal nesting place
for 21 of the UK's 24 species of seabird, mainly because of the abundance
of seafood thrown up by the cool tide of the North Sea mixing with the
warmer waters of the Atlantic. The demise of cod stocks in the North Sea
triggered the first concern that the sea's ecosystem was changing, though
the effects of overfishing were blamed.
-
- BBC1's Countryfile will today show evidence that seabirds
are being wiped out by the effects of climate change, and confirm that
a new and far greater threat has emerged. 'The whole food web is being
unravelled by climate change and this could fundamentally be the biggest
change in the North Sea since it was created 10,000 years ago,' said Euan
Dunn, head of marine policy for the Royal Society for the Protection of
Birds.
-
- Officials in Whitehall, already nervous over the potential
impact of global warming, are similarly worried. Environment minister Elliot
Morley said government-funded research was coming to the same 'fundamental'
conclusion as that of the foundation. 'It does appear that there is a migration
of plankton which is moving north into the colder waters and that the North
Sea is progressively warming. This is very important information,' he said.
-
- The rate of cold-water plankton migration though, according
to the Plymouth-based scientists, is astonishing, suggesting that the vital
food supply may have drifted up to 1,000km further north already, almost
the entire length of Britain.
-
- Average sea temperatures throughout the North Sea vary
from around 4C up to 8C. However an astonishing 4C increase in winter sea
temperatures has been recorded in recent years, a rise that experts predict
will escalate to Mediterranean-style temperatures that average above 20C
during summer.
-
- Some have taken comfort in the findings for their role
in explaining why up to 250 guillemots, puffins, razorbills and fulmars
were washed ashore on the Norfolk coast in March. Up to 200 fatalities
were found on the beaches off Northern France and Belgium around the same
time. It was impossible to gauge how many had sunk to the seabed.
-
- The previous year scores of dead seabirds drifted ashore
off Aberdeen, one of the North Sea's principal ports. Similarly evidence
that the North Sea's food chain is collapsing might explain the new phenomenon
of puffins switching from a fish diet to smaller birds.
-
- Certainly it provides a reason why warm-water fish like
squid, pilchards and the red mullet are becoming increasingly common in
the North Sea.
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- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2004 http://www.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,12374,1243291,00.html
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