Arctic bacterial diversity is vulnerable to climate change in the coastal margin of the Last Ice Area

Arctic climate change is leading to sea-ice attrition in the Last Ice Area along the northern coast of Canada and Greenland, but less attention has been given to the associated land-based ecosystems. Here we evaluated bacterial community structure in a hydrologically coupled cryo-ecosystem in the region: Thores Glacier, proglacial Thores Lake, and its outlet to the sea. Deep amplicon sequencing revealed that Polaromonas was ubiquitous, but differed genetically among diverse niches. Surface glacier-ice was dominated by Cyanobacteria, while the perennially ice-capped, well-mixed water column of Thores Lake had a unique assemblage of Chloroflexi, Actinobacteriota, and Planctomycetota. Species richness increased downstream, but glacier microbes were little detected in the lake, suggesting strong taxonomic sorting. Ongoing climate change and the retreat of Thores Glacier would lead to complete drainage and loss of the lake microbial ecosystem, indicating the extreme vulnerability of diverse cryohabitats and unique microbiomes in the Last Ice coastal margin.

Identifier
Source https://data.blue-cloud.org/search-details?step=~01231C685284B76AB17626D8A7833352B3DEFA1D165
Metadata Access https://data.blue-cloud.org/api/collections/31C685284B76AB17626D8A7833352B3DEFA1D165
Provenance
Instrument Illumina MiSeq; ILLUMINA
Publisher Blue-Cloud Data Discovery & Access service; ELIXIR-ENA
Publication Year 2024
OpenAccess true
Contact blue-cloud-support(at)maris.nl
Representation
Discipline Marine Science
Spatial Coverage (-73.789W, 82.601S, -72.659E, 82.670N)
Temporal Coverage Begin 2018-07-28T00:00:00Z
Temporal Coverage End 2019-07-21T00:00:00Z