From Washington Post - (not Washington Times)
BARROW, ALASKA About 23,600 square miles of Arctic sea ice melted every day in May, a record-high amount.
That is good news for one group: bowhead whales, the Arctics largest marine mammal.
Warming temperatures are leading to a massive sea-ice melt thats troublesome for native people and polar bears. Both rely on the ice to launch hunts. But the melt also seems to boost food availability, at least if youre a bowhead.
Heat from the sun causes a surge in phytoplankton blooms, a food source for the crustaceans that are key to whales diets. The melt thins sea-ice density, which eases movement for whales and their prey, and it revs up sea storms and wind, which helps nutrients reach the surface.
To get a sense of how massive this shift is, consider this: Summer sea ice has declined by more than 10 percent per decade since 1979. This means that what was once frozen sea in August and September isnt frozen anymore. Temperatures have heated up so much that the annual melting season has increased by about 20 days.
Decades of warming waters have caused recent milestones. In April, snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere reached its lowest point in half a century. A month later, the total amount of ice fell below that recorded at any time in the previous 38 years.
Bottom line is, changes here have been incredible, says Craig George, a senior bowhead biologist for the North Slope Borough Department of Wildlife Management in Barrow, an Arctic community of 4,500. The biggest shot in the arm, for the whales anyway, has been the sea-ice melt, which creates a better light penetration as sunlight hits nutrients in the photogenic zone.
Wedged between the Chukchi and Beaufort seas 1,200 miles from the North Pole, Barrow is the perfect place to study bowheads, which live exclusively in frigid Arctic waters from Russia to Greenland, migrating through the far north to follow the ebb and flow of the ice.
George has spent nearly 40 years studying the whales; he was here in 1982 when underwater microphones were used for the first time to locate them for a population study. We were able to find the animals under the ice and way offshore, George recalls.
Link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/theres-at-least-one-creature-on-earth-thats-loving-global-warming/2016/08/22/331cc880-43aa-11e6-8856-f26de2537a9d_story.html