: The Antarctic Ocean Is in Climate Crisis. This Week, the World Could Take a Big Step Towards Protecting Its Future #WorldNEWS Sixty years ago a dozen nations, including arch-rivals the United States

The Antarctic Ocean Is in Climate Crisis. This Week, the World Could Take a Big Step Towards Protecting Its Future #WorldNEWS
Sixty years ago a dozen nations, including arch-rivals the United States and the Soviet Union, agreed to preserve the Antarctic continent as a place of peace, research and conservation. Commercial exploitation of its resources and its animals was forbidden. Yet much of the ocean that surrounds the territory does not have the same protections.
This will be up for discussion during a virtual meeting of the Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) from 22-30 October. The Convention is meeting to discuss the region’s future and will decide whether or not it’s time to give some of the most biodiverse seas around Antarctica the same defenses as the land itself.

The timing couldn’t be more vital. The combined threats of global climate change and industrial fishing are weakening the crucial ecosystems that lie within its waters. Record high temperatures are breaking up ice sheets that have lasted millennia. On Feb. 6, a weather station on the Antarctic Peninsula—the 1,500 km long finger of land that reaches towards South America—reported a record temperature high of 18. 3°C. While members of a nearby scientific expedition researching penguin populations relished in the balmy weather, stripping down to t-shirts and bare chests, it was an ominous sign for a species better adapted to ice. Just a few days earlier the penguin researchers were reporting a 77% decline in some colonies.
The peninsula isn’t just one of the fastest warming places on earth. Its also home to some of the most exquisitely specialized species on the planet. Among them is Antarctic krill—the tiny, shrimp-like crustaceans that collectively form the largest biomass on the planet and are the cornerstone of the global ocean food chain. Yet the encroachment of industrial fisheries into these waters is threatening their health, as well as the penguins, seals and whales that are sustained by them.
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CCAMLR was established in 1982 with a mandate to protect Antarctic marine life through sustainable fisheries. It governs by consensus, and regulates fishing through quotas. The current quota for krill across the entire fishing fleet is limited to less than . 5% of the known biomass. That may not sound like much, but it can still have an outsize impact depending on where the krill is harvested, says Rodolfo Werner, an Argentina-based marine biologist who is currently advising the Pew Charitable Trust’s Antarctic Krill Conservation Project.
“The question is not how much krill you catch, but when you catch it and where,” Werner says.