8 October 2015, Science Daily, NOAA declares third ever global coral bleaching event, Bleaching intensifies in Hawaii, high ocean temperatures threaten Caribbean corals. As record ocean temperatures cause widespread coral bleaching across Hawaii, NOAA scientists confirm the same stressful conditions are expanding to the Caribbean and may last into the new year, prompting the declaration of the third global coral bleaching event ever on record. Waters are warming in the Caribbean, threatening coral in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, NOAA scientists said. Coral bleaching began in the Florida Keys and South Florida in August, but now scientists expect bleaching conditions there to diminish. “The coral bleaching and disease, brought on by climate change and coupled with events like the current El Niño, are the largest and most pervasive threats to coral reefs around the world,” said Mark Eakin, NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch coordinator. “As a result, we are losing huge areas of coral across the U.S., as well as internationally. What really has us concerned is this event has been going on for more than a year and our preliminary model projections indicate it’s likely to last well into 2016.” While corals can recover from mild bleaching, severe or long-term bleaching is often lethal. After corals die, reefs quickly degrade and the structures corals build erode. This provides less shoreline protection from storms and fewer habitats for fish and other marine life, including ecologically and economically important species. This bleaching event, which began in the north Pacific in summer 2014 and expanded to the south Pacific and Indian oceans in 2015, is hitting U.S. coral reefs disproportionately hard. NOAA estimates that by the end of 2015, almost 95 percent of U.S. coral reefs will have been exposed to ocean conditions that can cause corals to bleach. Read More here
Tag Archives: oceans
14 September 2015, Climate News Network, Southern Ocean starts to soak up carbon again. Scientists report that the great oceanic “lung” is again breathing in vast amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere – but can’t say why or whether it will last. The high seas have begun to respond again to the changes in the atmosphere, with two new studies confirming that the Southern Ocean is absorbing more atmospheric carbon. Levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have been steadily increasing as humans burn ever more fossil fuels, but climate scientists will probably hesitate before exhaling sighs of relief over the latest findings. Rising CO2 in the atmosphere means global warming, which means climate change, melting ice caps, rising sea levels − and even more global warming and climate change. So the discovery that one great stretch of hostile ocean is soaking up more of the stuff sounds like very good news. However, the celebrations are likely to be cautious, as there is no guarantee that the process is permanent. Read More here
23 August 2015, Climate News Network, Too warm, too few fish: Health warning for world’s oceans. Rampant overfishing combined with the impact of climate change is seriously endangering the wellbeing of the oceans, environmental analysts say. The world’s oceans – covering nearly two-thirds of the Earth’s surface, and on which much of human life depends – are under severe pressure, a report says. Over-fishing has dramatically reduced fish stocks. The thousands of tonnes of rubbish dumped in the oceans wreak havoc on marine life, while climate change is warming and acidifying them, putting them under further stress. These are the sobering conclusions of a wide-ranging study of the Earth’s ecosystems by theWorldwatch Institute, a US-based organisation widely rated as one of the world’s foremost environmental think-tanks. “Our sense of the ocean’s power and omnipotence – combined with scientific ignorance – contributed to an assumption that nothing we did could ever possibly impact it”, says Katie Auth, a researcher at Worldwatch and one of the authors of the report. “Over the years, scientists and environmental leaders have worked tirelessly to demonstrate and communicate the fallacy of such arrogance.” Read More here
14 July Washington Post, Human impact on the oceans is growing — and climate change is the biggest culprit: The world’s oceans have suffered a lot at the hands of humans — ask any marine conservationist. Unsustainable fishing, pollution and the effects of climate change are just a few of the issues that worry scientists and environmentalists. While we have a good idea of which activities are causing harm to the ocean, scientists have been less clear on which ones are the most damaging and which regions of the ocean are getting the worst of it. Now, new research has allowed scientists to map the impacts of 19 different types of human activity that have harmed the ocean over a span of five years. The study was published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications. The researchers used global-scale data to map the cumulative impacts of human activities between 2008 and 2013, pinpointing which areas are under increasing stress, which areas are experiencing a decrease and which human activities are having the biggest impacts in which areas. They found that nearly two-thirds of the ocean in experiencing an increase in these man-made impacts — and climate change is the worst of all, driving the majority of the changes the researchers observed. Read More here – access research maps here