Vast, free-drifting icebergs caused by climate change in the Southern Ocean are serving as hotspots for ocean life, scientists claim today.

As global warming increases, Antarctic ice shelves are shrinking and splitting apart to create floating islands of ice, some many miles across and over 100 feet high.

As they melt in the nearby Weddell Sea they release trapped terrestrial material.

US researchers found that this material significantly increases phytoplankton, krill and seabirds in a radius of more than two miles around the icebergs.

They estimate that overall the icebergs are raising the biological productivity of nearly 40 per cent of the Weddell Sea's area.

As well as helping ocean life, the researchers report in the Science journal that they found the icebergs could play a surprising role in tackling climate change.

"One important consequence of the increased biological productivity is that free-floating icebergs can serve as a route for carbon dioxide drawdown and sequestration of particulate carbon as it sinks into the deep sea," said oceanographer and lead researcher Ken Smith of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI).

"While the melting of Antarctic ice shelves is contributing to rising sea levels and other climate change dynamics in complex ways, this additional role of removing carbon from the atmosphere may have implications for global climate models that need to be further studied."

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