These extreme and unusual climate events if continued, could lead to extinctions of animals living in the outer limits.
>>In the Arctic, where summer sea-ice levels are crashing, a little extra snow doesn’t sound like it would be a bad thing. But in at least one corner of the Arctic, a new study shows that extreme snowfall was catastrophic, leading to breeding failures in all levels of the ecosystem in the summer of 2018.
For more than 20 years, researchers have carefully monitored the Arctic ecosystem around the research station at Zackenberg in northeast Greenland for over 20 years, according to a press release. When the snow melts away in June, the Arctic erupts into a riot of life, with plants poking out of the soil primed to bloom, insects emerging and hordes of shorebirds migrating long distances to the area to nest. While the success rate of each breeding season varies, life marches on—even in bad years.
But the summer of 2018 was different. By late July, snow still covered 45 percent of the landscape. At that point in the year, snow coverage should be closer to 4 percent on average, reports Jonathan Lambert at Science News.
“There were no birds singing, even the river was still frozen,” says Jeroen Reneerkens, avian ecologist at the University of Groningen and co-author of the new study in the journal PLOS Biology. “I was shocked.”<<
>>“One non-breeding year is hardly that bad for high-arctic species,” Schmidt says in a statement. “The worrying perspective is that 2018 may offer a peep into the future, where increased climatic variability may push the arctic species to—and potentially beyond—their limits. Our study shows that climate change is more than ‘just’ warming, and that ecosystems may be hard hit by currently still rare but extreme events.”<<
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/extreme-snowfall-kept-arctic-species-breeding-2018-180973354/