Oceans are heating up at breakneck speed, and the warming waters are threatening marine animals all over the world.
That’s the alarming takeaway from a pair of new studies on marine warming published this week in the journal PLOS Climate.
The researchers then calculated how common these extreme heat events are today. They’re becoming the norm across much of the world. By 2014, half the world’s ocean area exceeded the extreme heat threshold. By 2019, the last year the scientists examined, 57 percent of the world’s oceans had hit the mark.
The second PLOS Climate study looks specifically at the impact of future marine warming on coral reefs. Prolonged heat can cause reefs to “bleach,” or expel the colorful algae living inside them. These algae help provide the corals with nutrients—and if they go too long without them, they can die. The new study defines coral refugia as places where marine heat events—of the caliber likely to cause corals to bleach—occur only about once every 10 years. These spots are likely to have enough time to fully recover between bleaching events.
The goal of the Paris climate agreement is to keep global temperatures within 2 C of their preindustrial levels at all costs, and within 1.5 C if possible. Numerous studies suggest that the effects of climate change will significantly worsen above these levels. The two studies out this week underscore the growing risks posed by the warming oceans. They’re hardly the first to raise the alarm.
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