Ocean warming enhances hurricane activity, bleaches coral reefs and melts Antarctic sea ice. That warming has been off the charts for the past year.
Earth’s largest ecosystem is broiling. Every day for the last 12 months, the average temperature of most of the sea’s surface has been the highest ever recorded on that calendar date, preliminary data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration show.
Most hurricanes form in a stretch of the Atlantic Ocean between the Caribbean Sea and west Africa. This region is known as the main development region, or MDR, and sea surface temperatures there have been abnormally high. Right now, they’re more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above the long-term average for late April, which is about 25.5° C, data from NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch show.
Ultimately, the coral death toll from this bleaching is something we won’t know until months or years after the event is over, says marine ecologist Carly Kenkel of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. “But I can say that this is the worst bleaching that we’ve ever seen for the Caribbean, and it’s certainly looking like that for the Great Barrier Reef as well.”.
Up until around 2015, Antarctic sea ice was more or less stable over the long term, contrary to the predictions of climate models. Subsurface temperatures in the Southern Ocean began climbing around that time, and since then there have been three Antarctic summers during which sea ice hit record lows. As a result, some researchers have suggested that the heating of the Southern Ocean has helped push Antarctic sea ice into a new, diminished state.
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