This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Venice really is sinking. The home of gondolas, bridges and canals is built across a collection of islands, and the sediments beneath them are gradually compacting, causing the ground to subside.
But while the land moves down, climate change is pushing the water up—making the shallow lagoon surrounding the Italian city an increasingly vulnerable environment. To understand what that change means for the lagoon, a team of Western researchers led by Earth sciences professor Alina Shchepetkina dug into the mud this summer, studying the murky waters surrounding the historic city. Shchepetkina, along with graduate students Martina Duarte and Tess Gates-Flaherty, studied tiny organisms that burrow, feed and move through the sediment, leaving behind traces of their lives and providing a record of how a changing environment is affecting the ecosystem.
These clues also help scientists understand how similar changes played out in Earth's not-so-distant past. "These tiny organisms are very sensitive to their environment, so changes in their behavior can give us clues about changes in the ecosystem," said Duarte, a geology master's student. "By analyzing sediment cores layer by layer, we can look back roughly 70 years and see how those changes are recorded in the traces they leave behind." During 12 weeks in Italy, the research team collected and analyzed sediment cores, working layer by layer with University of Padua professor Massimiliano Ghinassi and the scientists, technicians and students in his lab to reconstruct how the lagoon's environment and its organisms have changed over the past several decades.
This work was supported by a Mitacs Globalink Research Award. The field study is a continuation of research that began last year in Canada, when Shchepetkina and Gates-Flaherty studied sediments and burrowing organisms in the Bay of Fundy on the East Coast, between Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. The two locations could hardly be more different.
The Bay of Fundy is one of the world's great tidal environments, with a difference of as much as 16 meters (52 feet) between high and low tide in some areas. The Venice Lagoon is microtidal, with a tidal difference closer to one meter (3 feet). But that contrast is exactly what makes the two places useful for this research.
"The Venice Lagoon is much warmer, with finer, muddier sediment and more extensive marshes, while the Bay of Fundy has stronger waves, much more sediment movement and a wider range of sediment, from mud to pebbles and gravel," said Gates-Flaherty, a geology master's student. "We found some similar organisms in both places, but also clear differences in the species and the traces they leave behind." The Venice Lagoon is particularly vulnerable to climate-driven environmental change. It is shallow, connected to the sea and heavily influenced by human activity.
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