Seals lending a fin to climate science

April 6, 2009 at 12:00a.m.

TROLL RESEARCH STATION, Antarctica (AP) — Into the Antarctic enigma, the puzzle of a place with too few researchers chasing too many climate mysteries, slowly waddles the elephant seal.

The fat-snouted pinniped, two ugly tons of blubber and roar, is plunging to its usual frigid depths these days in the service of climate science, and of scientists’ budgets.

“It would take years and millions and millions of dollars for a research ship to do what they’re doing,” Norwegian scientist Kim Holmen said of the instrument-equipped seals, whose long-distance swims and 1,000-foot dinnertime dives for squid are giving investigators valuable data about a key piece of southern ocean.

Climatologists and others say the icy continent has been monitored too thinly for too long in a warming world. Weather stations, glacier movement detectors and research treks over the ice are too few and far between.

“We’re monitoring routinely a small portion of the continent. I’d say 1 percent,” said David Holland, an Antarctic expert at New York University.

The reason to worry is clear: If all the land ice here melted, it would raise ocean levels 187 feet worldwide.

That theoretical possibility would take many centuries, but “Antarctica is huge, so even a small change would make a big difference,” said Jan Gunnar Winther, director of the Norwegian Polar Institute which operates this research station in East Antarctica.

Even a 1 percent loss of Antarctic ice would raise sea levels 2 feet, a slow-motion disaster for global coastlines.

Clues to the future emerge in bits and pieces, sometimes in chunks:

UIn 2002, the floating Larson B ice shelf fringing the West Antarctica peninsula, a piece of ice the size of Rhode Island, collapsed into the ocean, and the glaciers behind it began dumping land ice into the sea more quickly. Scientists are watching for the imminent collapse of another peninsular ice shelf, the Wilkins.

UIn a new analysis of the sparse data, scientists reported in January that Antarctica warmed by about 1 degree Fahrenheit (0.5 degrees Celsius) between 1957 and 2006, contrary to earlier belief that much of the continent was cooling.

UIn 2004, grass began growing on the warming West Antarctica peninsula. Just last month, researchers reported on dramatic biological changes under way: a decline in plankton in the nearby sea, in the krill that feed on it and in the penguins that feed on the krill.

“Antarctica is changing rapidly in unpredicted ways,” Holmen, the Norwegian institute’s research director, told environment ministers and other international officials visiting this outpost in East Antarctica’s icebound mountains in February.