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Impact of climate change on the Baltic Sea ecosystem over the past 1,000 years

Abstract

Climate change has a strong impact on ecosystem health, particularly in marginal seas1 such as the Baltic, for example causing the spreading of anoxic areas (oxygen-free areas, the so-called dead zones) through strong feedbacks. Marked ecosystem changes in the Baltic Sea have been recorded in the sedimentary archive, but the reasons are not fully understood2,3. Here we report an integrated study of high-resolution sediment records (past 1,000 years) in combination with an ecosystem modelling approach, providing new insights into the functioning of the Baltic Sea ecosystem under natural and human-influenced climatic changes. Between the Little Ice Age and the Modern Warm Period the surface water temperatures reconstructed using TEX86 palaeothermometry increased by 2 °C. Simultaneously, the anoxic areas in the Baltic Sea began to expand significantly as evident from the accumulation of laminated sediments. Ecosystem model simulations support our findings of widespread oxic areas during the Little Ice Age. Backed up by the modelling results that take into account anthropogenic-influenced nutrient load scenarios, our results provide evidence that surface temperature changes strongly influence deepwater oxygenation. This highlights the risk of a continued spreading of anoxic areas during scenarios of continued climate warming in the future.

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Figure 1: Map of the Baltic Sea.
Figure 2: Sediment proxy and instrumental data from the eastern Gotland Basin.
Figure 3: Reconstructed SST and ecosystem model results.

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Acknowledgements

We wish to thank M. Baas and J. Ossebaar for assistance with TEX86 analysis, the crew and colleagues on board of the research vessels P. A. Penck and M. S. Merian for their support, B. Wagner and V. Wennrich for the opportunity to use the ITRAX corescanner at Cologne Univ., M. Meier, A. Kotilainen and A. Kuijpers for fruitful discussion concerning this work and J. Lloyd for language revision. This research has received funding from the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013) under grant agreement 226600 and under grant agreement 217246 made with the joint Baltic Sea research and development programme BONUS, and from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research under grant agreement 03F0492A.

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M.M., T.N., K.K., C.P., J.S.S.D. and E.J. contributed to the writing of the main text of the manuscript. The Supplementary Information was prepared by K.K., C.P., M.M., H.S. and M.G. The manuscript was discussed and revised by all authors. M.M., T.J.A., E.J. and K.K. prepared the age model. K.K., F.A. and J.S.S.D. generated and interpreted the TEX86 data, other sediment related data was prepared by K.K., M.M. and T.L. H.S. and M.G. collected and evaluated the satellite data; C.P. and T.N. prepared and evaluated the model study.

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Correspondence to Karoline Kabel or Matthias Moros.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Kabel, K., Moros, M., Porsche, C. et al. Impact of climate change on the Baltic Sea ecosystem over the past 1,000 years. Nature Clim Change 2, 871–874 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate1595

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