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  • Review Article
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Antarctic benthic ecological change

Nature Reviews Earth & Environment volume 5, pages 645–664 (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

The benthic community around Antarctica is diverse and highly endemic. These cold-adapted species are under threat from local and global drivers, including warming, acidification and changes to the cryosphere. In this Review, we summarize observed, experimental and modelled Antarctic benthic ecological change. Warming, glacial melt and retreat, and reduced ice cover are causing regional benthic biomass to increase or decrease, depending on the additional influences of ice scour, turbidity and freshening. Additionally, the dominance of previously cold-restricted or light-restricted taxa is increasing, and several ecological tipping points have already been breached, leading to ecological phase shifts in some habitats. The largest changes have been observed in communities in the shallows of the West Antarctic Peninsula, notably change to distribution, biodiversity, biomass and trophic structure. Models based on observational and experimental evidence indicate that these changes will spread deeper and eastwards throughout this century. Available data are primarily limited to a handful of shallow-water taxa; thus, future work will need to involve multispecies observations and experiments encompassing multiple drivers to understand community and ecosystem responses, and autonomous monitoring techniques to fill geographical, bathymetric, seasonal and taxonomic gaps; advances in environmental DNA and artificial-intelligence-based techniques will help to rapidly analyse such data.

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Fig. 1: Drivers of present and future change in the Antarctic marine system.
Fig. 2: Antarctic bathymetry and sea-ice extents.
Fig. 3: Environmental drivers of changes in Antarctic benthic ecosystem structure and function.
Fig. 4: Impact of increased iceberg scour associated with sea-ice loss.
Fig. 5: Observed and predicted ecological impacts across a gradient between East and West Antarctica.

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Acknowledgements

H.J.G. and R.J.W. are funded by UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship MR/W01002X/1 ‘The past, present and future of unique cold-water benthic (sea floor) ecosystems in the Southern Ocean’. H.J.G. is also funded by BIOPOLE under the Natural Environment Research Council National Capability Science Multi-Centre award scheme (NC-SM2). V.J.C. is funded by the New Zealand Government’s Strategic Science Investment Fund (SSIF) to the National Institute for Water & Atmospheric Research Coasts and Estuaries Centre (CEME2402). A.V.deP. is funded by Belgian Science Policy (belspo) projects ADVANCE (RT/23/ADVANCE) and SO-BOMP (Prf-2019005_SO-BOMP). This paper contributes to the Marine Ecosystem Assessment of the Southern Ocean (MEASO), the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) Scientific Research Programme Integrated Science to Inform Antarctic and Southern Ocean Conservation (Ant-ICON), the Antarctic Nearshore and Terrestrial Observation Systems (ANTOS) and the NZ Antarctic Science Platform (MBIE ANTA1801). The authors thank A. Constable for his input and improvements to the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. British Antarctic Survey, Cambridge, UK

    Huw J. Griffiths & Rowan J. Whittle

  2. National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, Wellington, New Zealand

    Vonda J. Cummings

  3. OD-Nature, Royal Belgian Institute for Natural Sciences, Brussels, Belgium

    Anton Van de Putte

  4. Marine Biology Lab, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium

    Anton Van de Putte

  5. School of Environmental Sciences, University of Hull, Hull, UK

    Catherine L. Waller

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All authors researched data for the article. All authors contributed substantially to discussion of the content. H.J.G., V.J.C., R.J.W. and C.L.W. wrote the article. All authors reviewed and/or edited the manuscript before submission.

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Griffiths, H.J., Cummings, V.J., Van de Putte, A. et al. Antarctic benthic ecological change. Nat Rev Earth Environ 5, 645–664 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43017-024-00583-5

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