WHALE what's going on here then? Climate change's dramatic effects on the Southern Ocean just got easier to track, thanks to a comprehensive biodiversity map of the region.
Some estimates suggest that the Southern Ocean is home to half of all the human-linked carbon dioxide that the world's oceans absorb, and the consequent drop in ocean-water pH there has already begun to dissolve animal shells in the region.
The new Biogeographic Atlas of the Southern Ocean will make it easier to monitor problems like this. It details everything we know about the life in that ocean: what is there, where it exists and what it is like.
"How do we know if things are changing, and whether they're changing naturally or not, unless we know what's there?" says Graham Hosie, a contributor to the project from the Australian Antarctic Division.
The atlas draws on hundreds of thousands of records reaching back to the 18th century, and describes more than 9000 species, ranging from microbes to whales, including the shrimp-like Antarctic tanaid, pictured below.
The information will inform debates about the creation of marine parks in the Southern Ocean. "This type of bare-bones empirical information is what you need," says Hosie. "Because there are a lot of assumptions that get made in those debates about what is there or isn't there."
This article appeared in print under the headline "Antarctic Ocean life gets mapped"
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