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From The Guardian - Climate Change
Summary
- The world’s oceans are facing extreme heating, loss of oxygen, and acidification due to human activities like burning fossil fuels.
- Compound events in the oceans are becoming three times longer and six times more intense compared to the 1960s, disrupting marine ecosystems.
- The combination of extreme heat, deoxygenation, and acidification is pushing marine life towards tipping points that could have devastating consequences.
The world’s oceans are facing a “triple threat” of extreme heating, a loss of oxygen and acidification, with extreme conditions becoming far more intense in recent decades and placing enormous stress upon the planet’s panoply of marine life, new research has found.
About a fifth of the world’s ocean surface is particularly vulnerable to the three threats hitting at once, spurred by human activity such as the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation, the study found. In the top 300 meters of affected ocean, these compound events now last three times longer and are six times more intense than they were in the early 1960s, the research states.
The study’s lead author warned that the world’s oceans were already being pushed into an extreme new state because of the climate crisis. “The impacts of this have already been seen and felt,” said Joel Wong, a researcher at ETH Zurich, who cited the well-known example of the heat “blob” that has caused the die-off of marine life in the Pacific Ocean.
The research, published in AGU Advances, analyzed occurrences of extreme heat, deoxygenation and acidification and found that such extreme events can last for as long as 30 days, with the tropics and the north Pacific particularly affected by the compounding threats.
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Read the full post at The Guardian - Climate Change.
