The world’s oceans are currently a cause for great concern. Although high temperatures are breaking one record after another, one thing is clear: the warming is well outside natural fluctuations.
Every day for about a year now, the average surface temperature of the North Atlantic Ocean has been at its highest daily level since records began about 40 years ago – usually by a wide margin from the previous daily record. This is evident from data from the University of Maine’s ‘Climate Reanalyzer’ platform, which is based, among other things, on satellite measurements.
The continuous curve of daily record temperatures in the North Atlantic Ocean started on March 7 last year. For the world’s oceans as a whole, it started on March 14. “If you look at the temperature development in the oceans over the past forty years, you can see that the current warming is really far beyond natural fluctuations,” says Anders Levermann of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). .
El Niño increases warming even further
Mojib Latif of the Geomar Helmholtz Center for Ocean Research in Kiel, like Levermann, assumes that the climate phenomenon El Niño, which pumps heat from the ocean depths in the Pacific Ocean, increases warming. moderate the warming. However, both also emphasize the effect of human-induced climate change: “Oceans are a damn good indicator of global warming,” says Latif. The oceans absorb more than 90 percent of the heat left in the atmosphere due to the increase in greenhouse gases. “It is very clear that the oceans will warm as the Earth continues to warm.” Some researchers also see new emissions regulations in shipping as a factor.
“We have observed a global average warming of 1.2 degrees and the continents have already warmed by more than two degrees on average,” says Levermann. As the oceans warm, the water in them expands. Together with the melting of the ice, this causes sea levels to rise faster and faster, says Levermann: “At the beginning of the last century we had a sea level rise of about one centimeter per decade, at the beginning of this century about three and now around five.”
Consequences for our diet
The expert emphasized that warming also has fatal consequences for marine ecosystems. Ocean warming is disrupting countless food chains and networks. “This not only has consequences for marine life, but also for fisheries and therefore also for people’s diets.”
Climate researcher Latif points out that heavy rains may become more common because more water evaporates and warmer air can hold more water vapor, which will eventually come down as precipitation.
Source: Krone
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