It wasn’t supposed to happen this fast. Some of the reefs around the Florida Keys are dissolving. They may have crossed a tipping point due to increasing ocean acidification, raising the alarm that climate change impacts in the ocean are continuing to happen at a much quicker pace than scientists previously suspected. Rising carbon dioxide levels
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Warm ocean waters that sucked the color and vigor from sweeping stretches of the world’s greatest expanse of corals last month were driven by climate change, according to a new analysis by scientists, who are warning of worse impacts ahead. Climate change made it 170 times more likely that the surface waters of the Coral Sea, which off the
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Surfing is synonymous with riding waves all day, jamming to Jack Johnson, chilling around a beach bonfire by night and sleeping in a VW van before doing it all over again. But there’s another word idea that should also come to mind when imagining the idealized life of a surfer dude or dudette: science. In particular, research on ocean health
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We knew coral bleaching was a serious issue in the Great Barrier Reef, but the scope of just how widespread it was has been unclear — until now. Extensive aerial surveys and dives have revealed that 93 percent of the world’s largest reef has been devastated by coral bleaching. The culprit has been record-warm water driven by El Niño and climate
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“It was a gut punch.” That’s how Kim Cobb, a scientist at Georgia Tech, described what she saw on a recent dive on the reefs surrounding Christmas Island. She’s studied them for the better part of two decades and what she saw this April was something she had never seen before. Once vibrant reefs, some of the most pristine on the planet, were
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Solutions are bubbling up! Coral bleaching and ice sheet melting are bringing the heat, but at least we’ve got one idea to combat ocean acidification! Find out more on the Shum Show with Climate Central’s Multimedia Journalism Fellow, Greta Shum.
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Whether you’re underwater or under your umbrella, this week was drenched with water news. Severe thunderstorms came to the East Coast, and Climate Central released an analysis of how human-caused climate change has boosted nuisance flooding by 67% since 1950. Farther out to sea, coral reefs are suffering both from the heat and from ocean acidificat
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Coral reefs have had a rough run over the past two years. Climate change has ratcheted up ocean temperatures and El Niño helped kick them into overdrive in parts of the world. All that heat kicked off what has been a major coral die-off around the globe. While El Niño has passed its peak, scientists have warned that the global coral die-off, known
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As greenhouse gas pollution reshapes the invisible mosaic of seawater chemicals washing over Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, corals there are being locked in escalating conflicts with each other for survival. A modeling-based study by Australian government scientists has tracked ocean acidification for the first time through all of the thousands o
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For the past year, the world’s corals have been getting increasingly pummeled by climate change. Now with El Niño kicking ocean heat into overdrive, much of the world’s oceans have turned deadly for the world’s corals. On Thursday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced a global coral bleaching event. This year joins
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Carbon dioxide isn’t just in the atmosphere—it’s in the ocean, and it’s having some very disturbing side effects. Meteorologist Bernadette Woods Placky makes the connection between ocean acidification and a warming planet.
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Climate change is seriously stressing out the oceans. That’s the conclusion of a new study that used measurements of an array of human pressures on the ocean — from acidification to overfishing — to make a map of where those factors combined into stressed-out hotspots, as well as how the combinations of stressors had changed over time. They found
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