New Paper Shows How Sensitive the Ocean Biosystem Is to Climate Change

 Changes to the climate have had major impacts on the oceans and the biological systems that live there.  A new study sheds more light on how fast these systems respond to changes. What the authors find is that short term climate changes can require 1,000 years for recovery.  This means the current harm caused to the deep oceans by the changing climate will last for many centuries to come.

The new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Dr. Sarah Moffitt and her colleagues is novel for a number of reasons.  The researchers took core samples from ocean floor regions off the coast of California.  The location was chosen in part because of the exceptional synchrony between sediment archives from offshore California and ice core records from the Greenland Ice sheet.
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Among the changes documented are expansions and intensification of oxygen poor regions. These regions, called “Oxygen Minimum Zones” get larger when the oceans warm.  As these oxygen poor zones get larger, there is a predominance of animals that thrive in low-oxygen environments.  Animals that need higher levels of oxygen suffer and die off.

It isn’t just that one ecosystem replaces another.  Rather, a rich diversity of oxygen-loving biology is replaced by a much smaller diversity of low-population low-oxygen biology, and in particular single-celled organisms.  In short, the ocean floor changes from a rainforest to a desert.

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