Connecticut ecology - Connecticut

Connecticut College Professor: ´Global Warming could drastically ... - Connecticut College

April 03, 2009

NEW LONDON, Conn. - Forty-eight million years ago, during a period of intense global warming, the world´s tiniest warmth-seeking organisms migrated north, adapted and survived, according to new findings recently published in the March issue of PALAIOS, a bimonthly academic journal on the earth´s history as documented in paleontological and sedimentological record.

The study - co-authored by Peter Siver, director of the Environmental Studies Program and a member of the botany department at Connecticut College, and Alexander P. Wolfe, professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at the University of Alberta, Canada - indicates that a similar process going on today could indicate the beginning of another huge shift in the planet´s ecological profile.

"Our findings support the hypothesis that warmth-loving organisms will be able to migrate to northern latitudes and that polar regions will become inhabited with temperate, subtropical