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For part two of his series Journey to the Top of the World on the shrinking of the ice cap in the Arctic Ocean, CBS' Daniel Sieberg explained that it is not just warmer water that is changing the marine ecosystem. The melting ice is making the ocean less salty, too. "Saltwater ecosystems are more fragile than their freshwater counterparts" which means that phytoplankton may not survive. Missing phytoplankton poses a twofold problem: it is at the bottom of the food chain so its absence hurts zooplankton, which hurts fish, which hurts sea birds and so on; second phytoplankton absorbs carbon dioxide and exhales oxygen--fewer phyloplankta, less air for humans to breathe
While Sieberg was enjoying the cold of Nunavut, his colleague Mark Strassmann was assigned to cover the heatwave across the southeast--including footage of a playground on fire in Arlington Tex. "Officials suspect spontaneous combustion. The heat actually ignited rotted wood chips!"
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