The last of the bivalves

Friends, it is an exciting day when a project gets finished! Recently, several volunteers have been cranking away on a labor-intensive lab project, and the process is now complete! I am very excited to see all their efforts result in a dataset. The project is all about change in the Arctic Ocean. As you probably know, the polar regions are warming much faster than the rest of the world ocean, but we have yet to grapple with what that means for biodiversity. In 2023, my graduate student, Kharis, and I decided to find out. She found an excellent scientific paper from the early 2000s about biodiversity of tiny animals living between sediment grains in a high Arctic fjord, Kongsfjorden. We were planning a sampling trip of our own to Kongsfjorden at the time, so Kharis suggested that we repeat the sampling design from that previous study. By comparing results, we could see how the Arctic environment has changed over two rapidly-warming decades. Two of the bivalve species we...