DEEP SEA ORGANISM TO CLIMATE CHANGES

"The following write-up extracted from Nature News Service in the technical supplement to The Hindu dated 13/02/1997 is reproduced hereunder".

"Deep sea living organisms appear to have been able to survive changes in the world's climate, such as ice age or global warming, according to new finding published in 'Nature'.

The impact of climate change, on the diversity of living organisms - which is known as biodiversity - is of major concern to national governments. Biodiversity conservation is the subject of a United Nations Convention ratified by more than 100 countries. It is believed that climate change episodes, such as global warming, could lead to some species dying out.

But now research suggests that this may not be the case, using fossil records from beneath the North Atlantic. Thomas Cronin of the U.S. geological Survey in Virginia, and Maureen Raymo of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts have found that periodic ice ages more than 2 million years ago depleted the numbers of species living in the deep sea. But they also discovered that sufficient numbers remained to recolonise a new population when temperature began to rise. This shows that species which "disappear" during a cold patch become severely depleted but not exinct.

......to be continued....

Technorati Tags: Science/Space organisms biodiversity conservation MIT UN global warming cambridge ice ages cold patch The Hindu climatechange

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