| Summary: | participant The Antarctic Peninsula is among the most rapidly warming region on earth, having experienced a 3°C increase in annual temperature and a 6°C rise in the mean winter temperature since 1951. Delivery of heat from the Antarctic Circumpolar Current has increased significantly in the past decade, sufficient to drive a ~0.7°C warming of 300 m of shelf water below the permanent picnoclyne. In the past 50 years and continuing in the 21st century, the warm, moist maritime climate of the northern West Antarctic Peninsula (WAP) has been migrating south, displacing the once dominant cold, dry, continental Antarctic climate, and causing multi-level responses in the marine ecosystem. Through the presence of monitoring systems, field stations and long-term research in the WAP region, data on the food web composition and physical processes (e.g. temperature, sea-ice) of its pelagic ecosystem were obtained. A first analysis of the data was used in an inverse model to characterize the fluxes and rates between the different compartments of the ecosystem (small phytoplankton, large phytoplankton, bacteria, protozooplankton, krill, fish, salp, penguins, detritus, DOC, export) at two stations on a north to south gradient along the peninsula: Palmer station (Northern location) and Avian Island (Southern location). Results showed a difference in the flux between compartments at the north and south locations. Based on the inverse model results and further analysis of the data, a forward box model will be developed to enable tentative prediction of the WAP ecosystem response to climate change.
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