My talk is about how animals that
live in the Antarctic work
but particularly as they're living in an
environment, which is changing more
rapidly than anywhere else on Earth
that's the Western Antarctic Peninsula
it's a bit of a thermometer if you like for the Earth, things are
changing they're much more quickly than
they are anywhere else. I mean over
Antarctica is difficult to know what the
changes are, but on that Peninsula it's
warming it are very very fast rate and
so it's a sort of harbinger of things to
come so by looking at what's happening
there and looking at the response of
animals marine animals to those changes
we could perhaps see something about
what's going to happen in the future.
Immediate concerns are actually more
pollution than anything else I mean we
now have this new geological period
called the Anthropocene which people are
trying to evidence and the way you
evidence is you find things that human
beings have put there and in
Antarctica there are lots of things
arriving that people have put there
plastics and other types of
pollution, even though the Antarctic
Treaty says that you're not allowed to
pollute the place, but it's coming from
elsewhere, I mean we there's no part
of the globe that's not being impacted
by us even somewhere as remote as the
Antarctic. My concern is not so much that
they're getting rid of those pollutants
it's the idea of the big things that are
happening that tells what's happening
globally, so pollutants are a real
problem locally, globally the idea that
things are warming particularly that water
is warming and has less oxygen that's
one of the things that concerns me
something that probably doesn't get much
air time because you can't see oxygen
and you can't see it in the water, but in
fact that lack of oxygen because of
things warming up is actually fairly monumental in terms of how marine
animals work. What I've been doing
is looking at some gigantic species and
in Antarctica you have this amazing set
of species that occur no where else
but many of them are giants, so little
shrimps that you get down in the shore
here, which are about this size, there they're that size. Now if we're right about
oxygen decreasing because the
temperature goes up if those animals are
oxygen limited the big things will go
first and so you'll lose a whole set of
biodiversity a whole set of what makes Antarctica work, that will just disappear and
just because it's big and that's one of
the specific things that I want to test
will the big things, the giant things
disappear because they're oxygen limited
because the temperature increases.
