Stantec scientist helps document striking changes in Pacific Arctic ecosystem during ongoing study

The northern Bering and Chukchi Seas are among the world’s most productive ocean areas, home to millions of seabirds and marine mammals. The region has also long been one of the fastest-warming places on the planet. According to a scientific paper—co-authored by Dr. Francis Wiese and published Monday in Nature Climate Change—a multidisciplinary team of academic, government, and private sector scientists reports these Pacific Arctic ecosystems are undergoing dramatic changes in due to warmer ocean conditions. Wiese is Stantec’s Technical Lead for Marine Science in the U.S., based in Anchorage, Alaska.

Nature Climate Change is a monthly peer-reviewed science journal covering all aspects of climate change from both physical and social sciences. It is published by Nature Research, which also publishes the weekly Nature magazine.

Key observations over the past several years of the ongoing study include:

• Near-bottom waters that typically remained close to freezing year-round have warmed for parts of each fall and winter from 2014 to 2018.
• Sea ice that used to start forming each fall has been absent or sparse into January or February and the spring ice retreat was earlier than normal in recent years.
• Bowhead whales that typically migrate south of St. Lawrence Island were observed year-round north of the Bering Strait.
• In 2017, pink salmon were observed to have increased dramatically in abundance in the northern Bering Sea.
• Juvenile Arctic cod, which dominate pelagic fish communities in the northern Chukchi Sea, were substantially more abundant in 2017 than in 2012 and 2013.
• Ice seals were absent from vast portions of some of their main breeding areas, and dead seals were reported in unusually high numbers on the Bering and Chukchi coasts.

“Any one of these observations in isolation is significant,” Wiese said. “Put together, it tells a dramatic story of a system that is transforming into something we have not seen before.”

Wiese, who studies large ocean systems and the impacts of climate change and human activities on the marine environment, was involved in this study due to his intimate knowledge of the area and his leadership in the Marine Arctic Ecosystem Study, which received an award from the National Oceanographic Partnership Program last week. The scientific team, participating in a four-year Arctic Integrated Ecosystem Research Program (AIERP) funded by the North Pacific Research Board, in cooperation with other organizations, observed conditions in the northern Bering and Chukchi Seas more typical of subarctic ecosystems.

“The rate of change over the study timeframe came as a shock. Having a team with the expertise to put together the pieces across the whole ecosystem simply drives home how far-reaching the changes are and how much they matter,” said Henry Huntington, lead author of the article.

The team of authors includes physical and biological oceanographers, ichthyologists, ornithologists, marine mammalogists, marine ecologists, and social scientists from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, the University of Washington, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, the North Slope Borough Department of Wildlife Management, the North Pacific Research Board, Stantec, and Huntington Consulting.

University of Alaska Fairbanks co-author Seth Danielson describes the observed changes as a wake-up call.

“Oftentimes when significant ecological reorganizations take place, we are only able to try to piece the story together after the fact,” Danielson said. “In this instance, we had the unusual opportunity to be cognizant of change as it was happening so we could purposefully document the process as it unfolded.” 

The big question for scientists remains whether these changes reflect a new norm. Collaborative research efforts like this are important because they allow scientists to monitor changes at the right scales as they are happening and provide meaningful information to local communities and resource managers, so they are better able to respond and adapt.

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