August 27, 2014 — Half of Iceland's seabirds nest on this low-lying volcanic outcropping and its neighboring islands in the deep west coast gash called Breidafjordur Bay. Flatey Island used to be covered with chicks snuggled inside rocky hillside burrows, under tall meadow grass, in nests strewn across headlands and shores.
"There were thousands! You could hear them," says Olina Jonsdottir, who has lived on this island with her husband, Hafsteinn Gudmundsson, nearly 50 years. She looks out her living room window, past the sheep grazing on knuckles of grass-covered lava, past the black basalt beach, to the few birds drifting over the water beyond. "You can't do that anymore. Now there are so few."
Iceland, circled by the food-rich currents of Atlantic, Arctic, and polar waters, is the Serengeti for fish-eating birds. Its rocky coast, hillocky fields, and jutting sea cliffs are breeding grounds for 23 species of Atlantic seabirds, hosting an indispensable share of Atlantic puffins, black murres, razorbills, great skuas, northern fulmars, and black-legged kittiwakes.
But the nests have gone empty in the past few years, and colonies throughout the North Atlantic are shrinking.
The suspected culprits are many. But the leading candidates are the array of profound changes under way in the world's oceans—their climate, their chemistry, their food webs, their loads of pollutants.
Warming oceans and earlier thaws are driving away the seabirds' prey; unleashing deadly, unseasonal storms; and knocking tight breeding schedules off-kilter. Mounting carbon dioxide absorption and melting glaciers are acidifying and diluting the aquatic balance, jeopardizing marine life and the creatures that depend on it for food.
Alarmed scientists have returned from fieldwork throughout the North Atlantic with sobering descriptions of massive chick die-offs and colonies abandoned with eggs still in the nests.
Read the full story at National Geographic