The temperature of the oceans is the highest in the last forty years. This is concluded from the data recently offered by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of the United States (NOAA). In fact, daily records have been recorded since March 2023. A new historical maximum was broken on February 28, when the average temperature of the oceans reached 21.2 degrees Celsius for the first time. Since then, international scientists have expressed concern about how this warming could affect marine ecosystems.
Oceanographer Richard Spinrad, undersecretary of the US government and administrator of NOAA, points to man-made climate change and the El Niño phenomenon in the Pacific Ocean as the main causes of these exceptional temperatures. And this departure from the trend of typical seasonal temperatures could also lead to increasingly extreme hurricanes, according to an article in the Financial Times.
Coral reefs are one of the marine ecosystems most sensitive to ocean warming. In particular, these species suffer bleaching, a process by which they lose their distinctive color because the microalgae that live inside them die due to sudden changes in water temperature.
Last March, the North American agency recorded the fourth mass bleaching of coral reefs globally and, in fact, one of its dependent observatories, the Coral Reef Watch, has introduced three new alert levels because the scale they used It has previously become obsolete. The regions of the eastern Pacific and the Greater Caribbean are some of the most affected by this phenomenon derived from extreme heat.
Scientists point to the extension of the hurricane season as another of the main consequences of this sustained warming. In the Atlantic, the hurricane season historically ranges between the months of June and November. However, records are seeing tropical cyclones forming before June 1 and storms extending beyond the end of November. It is even feared that this pattern will continue once El Niño gives way to La Niña, which causes the sea surface to cool.
The oceans absorb 90% of the heat associated with greenhouse gas emissions and the Atlantic acts as the largest carbon sink in the Northern Hemisphere. However, the director of NOAA believes that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, a phenomenon that acts as a thermoregulator for the Earth by circulating warm waters to the north and cold waters to the south, could be slowing down due to this historic warming. , with consequences that are still difficult to gauge for marine life.
