The ocean is undergoing unprecedented changes. What does it mean for marine life, the planet, and us?
The hot water killed the phytoplankton — a form of microscopic algae — that live in the top few hundred feet of the ocean. The tiny organisms that feast on them starved, including krill, the small shrimplike creatures that swarm the ocean by the billions and are the preferred food for whales, salmon, seabirds, and many other creatures. The population of herring and sardines, an important food source for many larger fish and marine mammals, also declined.
Despite our intimate connection to the sea, for most of human history the ocean has been as strange to us as a distant planet, a realm of monsters and mayhem. Humans stuck close to the shore, mostly, and our ignorance about the ocean was profound. It still is. Scientists have only a vague understanding of exactly how ocean currents are driven, or how ocean temperatures impact cloud formation, or what creatures thrive in the depths.
A dead whale in Pacifica, California, 2015, amid an ocean heat wave that disrupted the food chain in the Pacific. Photo credit: Bruce Gifford/Getty Images “If a 200-mile-long stretch of forest in the California mountains suddenly died, people would be shocked and outraged,” says Laura Rogers-Bennett, a marine scientist at the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, who works at the Bodega Marine Lab just up the coast. “We’re talking about the collapse of an entire ecosystem. But because it happened in the ocean, nobody notices.”
Marine heat waves are also inflicting massive damage on coral reefs . Reefs are the most bio-diverse ecosystems on the planet — they occupy less than one percent of the ocean floor, but are home to more than 25 percent of marine life. Reefs are created by millions of coral colonies that build calcium carbonate skeletons. For the past 100 million years or so, corals have thrived in a happy marriage with microscopic plants called zooxanthellae that live embedded in their tissues.
The increasingly acidic waters in the Pacific are already impacting the shells of Dungeness crabs, jeopardizing the $200 million crabbing industry on the West Coast. To prevent the acidic waters from dissolving those shells, oyster farmers in Oregon and Washington have to raise baby oysters in incubators before planting them on the beach to grow to adulthood.
, the big question scientists were trying to answer was how much warm circumpolar deep water was upwelling onto the continental shelf and how much of that warm water was getting beneath the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, melting it from below. “The ocean holds the key,” one scientist told me. “To understand what is happening in West Antarctica, you have to understand what is happening in the Southern Ocean.
In Antarctica, small changes in ocean temperature have big implications. A change of even one or two degrees in the waters that wash up against the base of the glaciers could cause the ice to melt. “Before our trip last year, I think I was already convinced that extensive retreat of Thwaites is almost inevitable,” Robert Larter, a marine geophysicist and the chief scientist on my trip to Antarctica, told me.
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