Arctic archipelagos may act as 'refrigerators' for cold-loving species

ARKHANGELSK, June 2. /TASS/. Arctic archipelagos, such as Novaya Zemlya or Greenland, may act as "refrigerators" where cold-loving species of animals and plants can remain even in significant climate warming, Director of the Laverov Federal Research Center for Integrated Arctic Studies (the Urals Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences Ivan Bolotov told TASS.

"The planet has seen such warming, and it was even more powerful. The cold-loving species in the Arctic somehow were able to survive, like, for example, on Novaya Zemlya. Arctic archipelagos have certain buffering properties, and they may be working like a giant refrigerator. The climate is warming, forests are approaching the ocean coast, and the cold-loving fauna on the mainland is disappearing. But in places like Novaya Zemlya or Greenland, if the ice sheets remain there, as well as in the mountains, will anyway remain conditions for the existence of high-latitude fauna," he said.

Presently, the high-latitude Arctic is represented mainly by islands, he continued. The planet now is in a relatively warm period - the Holocene, which is the modern geological epoch that replaced the previous one - the Pleistocene - about twelve thousand years ago. Our time is characterized by less development of ice sheets, unlike it used to be in some periods of the Pleistocene, which continued for about 2.5 million years. At that time, on the Earth dominated the so-called megafauna, and the mammoth was its prominent representative.

Where Arctic species will survive

Since then, highly-Arctic species have remained on the planet, including, for example, musk oxen. Before the Holocene, the Arctic shelf's significant part was dry, and these species were much more widespread. "There used to be huge spaces connecting the now separated islands and archipelagos, for example, such as the Wrangel Island. There used to be a connection between North America and Asia, the so-called Beringia, the sunken land. That all is flooded now. There are risks that remnants of these Arctic organisms will die over the progressing warming, which we have been witnessing," the scientist said.

The mammoth range was huge, while the last population remained on the Wrangel Island, and that one finally disappeared about 4,000 years ago.

At the same time, some 6-3 thousand years ago, there was a Holocene climatic optimum, when the planet was even warmer, and that period of warmth was long. The forests reached the areas where now tundras are. "We have worked in the northern part of the Kanin Peninsula, where in the river valleys we could see stumps and logs, preserved from those forests. Nowadays, of course, there are practically no forests there," the scientist said. However, even during this period, some high-latitude species were able to survive on archipelagos with preserved ice sheets.

"So let's hope not everything is lost. The high-altitude counterparts of the Arctic are in a more vulnerable form. These are, for example, the Caucasus highlands. As the climate continues getting warmer, there will remain fewer and fewer mountain-tundra areas in the Caucasus Mountains. And these small bits of the high-altitude Arctic may really disappear completely if modern warming continues," the expert said in conclusion.