Portland State Magazine Winter 2017

WINTER 2017 PORTLAND STATE MAGAZINE 15 nests of Adélie penguins and causing their numbers to decline. Another species, the Gentoo penguin, flourished because they breed later in the season when there’s no snowmelt flooding. “Rising sea levels are kind of abstract,” Fountain says. “But dying baby penguins—that’s pretty tangible.” In a kind of zero-sum ecological game, one species’ loss is another’s gain. For example, global warming is good for krill, which is good for whales. But at the North Pole, polar bears are endangered because their habitat is melting away. “With climate change, it’s not a matter of good or bad, but winners or losers,” Fountain says. “The climate is changing. Whether or not you like the change is up for you to decide.” A NUMBER of PSU researchers—as well as scientists from all over the world—have found Antarctica to be one of the world’s best laboratories for studying the effects of climate change. Some 30 countries operate seasonal and year-round research stations on the continent, which is roughly the size of the United States. Antarctica is a hostile landscape that locks up millions of cubic miles of ice, and where biological activity is sparser than in warmer parts of the globe. With global warming, all that is changing. And the change is visible. Brad Buckley, PSU biology faculty, has traveled to Antarctica seven times in the past 16 years studying the effects of warming on fish. He’s found that it doesn’t take much change to have a dangerous impact on the health of the fish he’s studying. At the same time, other species, including king crabs, are moving in—just one effect out of thousands that result from small changes in temperature. He sees more consequences on the horizon. “We’re worried that the sea ice is going to be thinner—that it’s going to form later and break up sooner than usual,” he says. “When you do that, you disrupt the base of the Antarc- tic food web, which is the algae that grows on the bottom of the sea ice. Tiny grazers eat the algae, and fish eat the grazers. If we start seeing a significant loss of sea ice in the Antarctic, it’s going to have major ecological ripple effects.” Meanwhile, biology faculty Todd Rosenstiel and Sarah Eppley are in the second year of a three-year project with the Chilean Antarctic Institute to study mosses on the Antarctic landscape. Rosenstiel says it’s the largest global warming experiment in Antarctica, based on the number of experiment installations. The team set up 60 open-top chambers that operate like mini greenhouses over mossy areas. The cham- bers raise the temperature 2 degrees—a number selected to align with the Paris Agreement’s mandate to reduce carbon emissions and keep global temperature increases this century to below 2 degrees—and provide scientists a glimpse of how further warming might impact the antarctic ecosystem. The experiments are taking place on an island off the coast of the Western Antarctic Peninsula, where mosses and lichens are spreading over vast areas once covered by glacial ice. It’s warming faster than almost anywhere else on Earth. Rosenstiel says there are 110 species of moss in Antarctica, including the moss commonly found on Portland rooftops. The presence of moss is an indicator that the Earth is warming, but it’s also a harbinger of even more rapid change. Moss absorbs the sun’s heat and warms the underlying soil, creating conditions that invite even more plants. Also, there’s a possibility that the presence of moss may affect the precipi- tation cycle, helping to create more rain. “It’s beginning to rain in the Western Antarctic Peninsula and nothing melts ice quicker than rain,” Rosenstiel says. Mosses are opportunists, and as glaciers continue to retreat, Rosenstiel says, “Antarctica is theirs for the taking.” And the more the moss spreads, the more the ecosystem will change with some species likely moving down from South America. Eppley says the team is already seeing the spread of flowering plants, and they’ve even observed a winged insect. FOR ANDREW FOUNTAIN , Antarctica is an ideal place to study glaciers, which is his specialty. Melting glaciers are the source of water that is already causing sea levels to rise. There are three main places to study them: mountains, Greenland and Antarctica. Mountain glaciers are retreating, but at a steady rate. By contrast, the melting in Greenland and Antarctica is accelerating, he says. The kind of extreme weather event that triggered the flooding in the McMurdo Dry Valleys is happening more frequently, and is not confined to Antarctica. “There was a really warm event in Greenland at about the same time,” he says. All of which is setting the stage for a new Earth, one that is changing before our eyes.  Chelsea Bailey is the communications and marketing manager in the PSU College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Glacier scientist Andrew Fountain (right) and colleague Joe Levy are studying the lasting effects of a 2001-02 warming event in East Antarctica’s snow-free McMurdo Dry Valleys. Photo by Thomas Nylen.