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Here I want to give a brief introduction to biological studies conducted in this Artic expedition. First of all, we need to understand the significance of Arctic research. We must study the Arctic to understand the area and its climate and to predict climate change. Recent studies suggest that the earliest onset of warming will occur in the polar regions, and that such changes will be the largest in polar regions. The climate changes have big impacts on Arctic region, atmospheric environment, ocean and etc. In the 1970s, the temperature in the Arctic Ocean, the continent of Asia, the continent of Europe and north part of the continent of North America increased rapidly, especially in the winter and spring. Over the past 400 years, temperature has kept rising. From the 1920s to the 1950s, the area of sea-ice cover and the thickness of sea ice in Arctic Ocean have been decreasing. The area of sea-ice cover was decreased by 10%-15% and the thickness of the sea ice was reduced by 1.3 meters. Recent researches have shown that in the big background of global warming, if the CO2 concentrations were doubled in the 1980s, the temperature in Arctic will increase by about 2°-3°C on average. Thus the multiyear sea ice will thaw and disappear which will result in the environmental change and have great impacts on the ecological system in the Arctic region. Due to the above reasons, some research organizations and countries have proposed a number of Arctic research plans and have organized some research expeditions to Arctic. The major objective of this Arctic research expedition focuses on biodiversity of life in Arctic Ocean. The Arctic expedition collects various scientific sampling species including bacteria, arctic whales, etc. Now I want to give a brief description about the biota we are observing.
Due to time limitation, that is all for today. The Web team gratefully acknowledges Fay Tang, NOAA Special Projects, for translating this audio clip into English. |
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