Arctic ponds disappearing

I so pity the poor animals. Take a look:

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Ancient ponds in the Arctic are drying up during the polar summer as warmer temperatures evaporate shallow bodies of water, Canadian researchers said on Monday.

They said the evaporation of these ponds -- some of which have been around for thousands of years -- illustrates the rapid effects of global warming, threatening bird habitats and breeding grounds and reducing drinking water for animals.

For the past 24 years, researchers at the University of Alberta in Edmonton and Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, have been tracking ponds at Cape Herschel, located on the east coast of Ellesmere Island in Nunavut, formerly the Northwest Territories of Canada.

Last year, when they went back to check, some of these 6,000-year-old ponds had vanished.

"We were surprised. We arrived in early to mid-July and the ponds we had been monitoring were dry. Some of them had dried up completely. Some were just about to lose the last remaining centimeters of water," said Marianne Douglas, director of the Canadian Circumpolar Institute at the University of Alberta.

"It's really interesting to see how quickly it is happening. We could see this trend had started a while ago but at no time did we expect it to accelerate," said Douglas, whose work appears in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Douglas said a study of the fossilized sediments in these pools of water -- which are less than 6.6 feet deep -- showed climate changes beginning as long as 150 years ago.

The researchers had thought these ponds were permanent. But change has come rapidly.

And it's going to continue. The ecosystem is in grave difficulty.