North America's northernmost lake affected by global warming

Terra Daily: ... In an article to be published in the September 28 edition of Geophysical Research Letters, the international research team led by Universite Laval scientists Warwick Vincent and Reinhard Pienitz reports that aquatic life in Ward Hunt Lake, a body of water located on a small island north of Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic, has undergone major transformations within the last two centuries.

The speed and range of these transformations-unprecedented in the lake's last 8,000 years-suggest that climate change related to human activity could be at the source of this phenomenon.

"This is of course an extreme environment for living organisms, but our data indicate that current conditions make the lake a more favorable location for algae growth than it was in the past," points out [lead author and Center for Northern Studies researcher Dermot] Antoniades. "We cannot claim with certainty that these changes were brought on by human activity, but natural variations observed over the last millennia were never so abrupt and extensive," concludes the researcher.