When Jeroen Reneerkens stepped off the plane in Greenland, all he saw was white.
The avian ecologist at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands was expecting to find snowless tundra teeming with life, as he had each summer for nearly a decade. Reneerkens travels to Zackenberg Research Station in northeast Greenland to study sanderlings — slight, mottled-brown arctic shorebirds — as they and other migratory shorebirds noisily descend on the open tundra to breed each summer (SN: 11/13/18).
But when Reneerkens arrived in 2018, he found only snow and silence. “There were no birds singing, even the river was still frozen,” Reneerkens says. “I was shocked.”
A study published October 15 in PLOS Biology documents an ecosystem-wide reproductive collapse around Zackenberg in 2018. Most plants and animals, including everything from arctic foxes to tiny Dryas flowers, failed to reproduce that year, because an extremely snowy winter left much of the ground covered with snow well into summer, Reneerkens and colleagues found.