Determining the links between the behavioural and population responses of wild species to environmental variations is critical for understanding the impact of climate variability on ecosystems. Using long-term data sets, we show how large-scale climatic anomalies in the Southern Hemisphere affect the foraging behaviour and population dynamics of a key marine predator, the king penguin. When large-scale subtropical dipole events occur simultaneously in both subtropical Southern Indian and Atlantic Oceans, they generate tropical anomalies that shift the foraging zone southward.

Figures index : From the study "Drying of Indian subcontinent by rapid Indian Ocean warming and a weakening land-sea thermal gradient".

Original Source

This new study led by an Indian scientist Dr Roxy Mathew Koll, from the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM) Pune, points out a significant decreasing trend in the summer monsoon rainfall over the central Indian subcontinent during the past century. It suggests an important role of the rapid warming in the Indian Ocean in weakening of monsoon circulation and rainfall.

Recent studies have pointed out an increased warming over the Indian Ocean warm pool (the central-eastern Indian Ocean characterized by sea surface temperatures greater than 28.08C) during the past half-century, although the reasons behind this monotonous warming are still debated. The results here reveal a larger picture—namely, that the western tropical Indian Ocean has been warming for more than a century, at a rate faster than any other region of the tropical oceans, and turns out to be the largest contributor to the overall trend in the global mean sea surface temperature (SST).