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The Nioghalvfjerdsfjorden glacier picked up stones in Greenland that later turned up at the bottom of the sea as new housing for marine creatures.Credit: guardian_v2\/Alamy<\/p>\n
In an extraordinary climate-change twist, marine creatures are gaining new homes on the Arctic sea floor<\/a>, thanks to glaciers breaking up hundreds of kilometres away.<\/p>\n Hello puffins, goodbye belugas: changing Arctic fjord hints at our climate future<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n The number of stones at the bottom of an Arctic strait has been growing, providing habitat for corals, sponges and other animals, according to a paper published on 10 June in Nature1<\/a>. Scientific sleuthing has detailed how the rocks got there: they were swept up by glaciers in Greenland<\/a> and Russia and carried to the coast. There, the glaciers spat out icebergs that drifted south, melted and dropped their load of rocks. These \u2018dropstones\u2019 sank to provide deepwater oases of biodiversity. Climate change<\/a> played a part by accelerating the pace of the glaciers\u2019 flow and the icebergs\u2019 melting, the paper says.<\/p>\n \u201cClimate change impacts our world in ways we never even thought of,\u201d says co-author Kirstin Meyer-Kaiser, a marine biologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.<\/p>\n The work \u201cis a \u2018wow\u2019 example for how incredibly connected different parts of our planet are\u201d, says Bodil Bluhm, a marine biologist at UiT The Arctic University of Norway in Troms\u00f8, who was not involved with the research.<\/p>\n Rubbishy glaciers<\/p>\n Dropstones occur in many polar regions2<\/a> but are understudied because they are hard to find and collect. In 2021, Meyer-Kaiser\u2019s team got a rare opportunity when they were in the Fram Strait, between Greenland and the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, aboard the German research icebreaker RV Polarstern<\/a>. Helicopter pilots who had been reconnoitring the sea ice around the ship told scientists onboard that they had found a new \u2018island\u2019.<\/p>\n It turned out to be an icy hill of black stones emerging from the sea ice \u2014 an enormous iceberg, laden with debris from when it had been part of a glacier grinding across Arctic rocks. The scientists took ice and rock samples from the iceberg and began to wonder what would happen to it.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/d41586-026-01835-8_27185968.jpg\"\/)
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