Excerpt from ecowatch.com
Climate change not only warms the atmosphere, but the world’s oceans. A new study of 150 years of data on sea-surface temperatures in the Greater Caribbean region shows that coral reefs have been warming there since 1915, a trend that has caused harm to their ecosystems.
The study, “A century of warming on Caribbean reefs” by Colleen Bove and colleagues from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, was published in the journal PLOS Climate.
“Greenhouse gas emissions are warming the planet, intensifying natural disturbances (e.g., fires and cyclonic storms), and modifying countless other aspects of the environment,” the study’s introduction states. “This is causing extinctions, altering species composition, and degrading nearly every ecosystem on earth. Although we tend to think of surface warming as a terrestrial phenomenon, the oceans have stored about 93% of the additional retained heat since 1955.”
The study examined warming trends from 1871 to 2020, and is an updated assessment of prior research on coral reef temperature trends using data from 5,326 reefs in the Caribbean, divided into eight sub-regions, Phys.org reported. Satellite data and sea-surface temperature monitoring were also used.
The sub-regional reef locations ranged from 84 in the Gulf of Mexico to 1,277 in the Greater Antilles, reported Nature World News.
In half of the sub-regions in the study, the warming started before 1915, according to Phys.org.
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