At Steinberg’s lab, researchers are examining how warming oceans — Antarctic krill need water colder than 4 degrees Celsius (39 Fahrenheit) to survive — are altering krill’s life cycle.

Heart of the Antarctic. If krill is the staff of life for the baleen whales of the Southern Ocean—if these great animals are just so much recycled krill—then so it is for most Antarctic creatures.

Submarine canyons around Antarctica tend to have less sea ice, higher sea surface temperatures, and more biomass such as phytoplankton blooms than the shelves they cut into. Phytoplankton blooms ...