The data they collected revealed some bad news and some good news. The researchers then compared current and historical data on the diet, body weight and chick growth of little auks at Franz-Josef Land. These devices, called miniaturized temperature–depth recorders, provided information on the depth and duration of every dive, as well as the hours spent each day gathering food. They also tagged a number of little auks from one colony with tiny electronic devices affixed to legs or breast feathers to track their foraging behavior. Using remote sensing data, the scientists measured changes in the volume and area of sea ice and glaciers between 19. But Grémillet and his colleagues suspected the bird might reach a breaking point due to its high energy costs and metabolic rate, as well as a diet primarily made up of copepods-tiny crustaceans that are themselves highly reactive to changes in sea ice and water temperature. Previous research has suggested that the little auk is quite flexible in the face of changes to its environment. The most abundant seabird in the Atlantic Arctic, with over 40 million individuals, the little auk is a major part of the food chain in polar ecosystems. They chose the little auk as a subject because it is a so-called sentinel species, one that can be used as a proxy for the health of an entire ecosystem, much like the polar bear. Grémillet and his colleagues wanted to measure how the ecosystem of this icy Arcadia is responding. But temperatures in the Arctic are rising, and are predicted to increase by as much as 14 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century. Nearly 85 percent of its land mass is blanketed by glaciers and its islands are surrounded by extensive sea ice. Given its remote high-Arctic location, Franz-Josef Land has long been considered a kind of Arctic Eden, sheltered from the impacts of climate change. Their findings call into question some models of climate change impacts on polar ecosystems, argues David Grémillet, the lead scientist of the group, in research published in Global Change Biology in mid-January. There they spent two months at Tikhaya Bay on Hooker Island, one of the archipelago’s 191 islands, tagging and studying a small black and white seabird called the little auk (Alle Alle), which nests on cliffs and dives for its dinner in the frigid water. In July of 2013, a team of scientists from France, Russia and the United States descended upon an uninhabited archipelago in the Russian Arctic called Franz-Josef Land, the northern most archipelago in the world. This article is republished with permission from GlacierHub.

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