Out of the 5 major oceans, the Arctic is the smallest and shallowest. It is completely covered with ice during the winter, and remains mostly covered during the summer. Despite the frigid and seemingly lifeless conditions, this area holds a wealth of life, and an entire ecosystem thrives off of this body of water. While a few animals live on the land near the Arctic, the real ecosystem exists beneath the water, as many marine creatures such as jellyfish, walruses, fish, and even whales, live off of what the Arctic has to give. Despite the extremely cold conditions, a base of phytoplankton and algae, along with many species of foliage, gives the ecosystem the base energy it needs. The Arctic was largely shrouded in mystery throughout history, …show more content…
These birds migrate over the Atlantic and Pacific oceans all the way to Antarctica, which has food-rich waters throughout the summer. The sheer distance of their yearly migration is what makes these birds so impressive, the round trip is, on average, 56,000 miles! When tracked, these birds seem to take an indirect route on their way to Antarctica, curving in an S pattern instead of flying straight. When studied further, however, we found that they have learned to take advantage of prevailing wind systems, actually speeding up the trip. These birds live a lifetime of about thirty years, so that means they may travel over 1.5 million miles in their lifetime! Some scientists state that since these birds experience summer at each of the poles, they see more sunlight than any other creature(Cornell Lab of Ornithology). The Arctic is important for a multitude of reasons, but let’s start with its importance for the entire planet. Both the Arctic and and Antarctic help the earth control the global climate, and the ice helps reflect heat from the sun back into space. Unfortunately, both the thickness and the amount of ice has declined in the past thirty years, and this can become more serious as time passes. The ice also holds large deposits of methane, and keeping the ice cold helps to keep the methane from being released into our atmosphere(Arctic …show more content…
It cools off the planet, keeps harmful greenhouse gases at bay, and slows down processes that would otherwise harm our planet, but what would happen if The Arctic just ceased to exist? Well, almost immediately, the earth would get a lot warmer. Most of the cold fronts that make an area chilly are winds that originated from one of the poles, so that cold air would just stop. Secondly, all the plants and animals that rely on this ecosystem would die, and the few humans who live there would be forced to move. Polar bears rely on the ice to rest, and all kinds of plants and animals rely on the cold created by the ice, so a lot of death would occur. For life on earth as a whole, and as previously stated, the absence of The Arctic would cause the temperature of the earth to change drastically, and more life than just that in The Arctic would suffer(MNN). We would be much more susceptible to harmful rays of sunlight, which would usually be reflected by the large quantities of ice at the poles, and that would lead to less plentiful crop yields, a large increase of cancer, and the addition of much shorter winters and much longer summers to our yearly schedule. This ecosystem, as all ecosystems are to an extent, is important to the entire world, and without it, we couldn’t live the lives we do today, so we must learn to avoid harming it, as well as attempt to reverse the damage already done(Defenders 2). There are many threats to The Arctic,