Oxygen Deleted Dead Zones in Oceans Increasing Due to Global Warming

"Records stretching back to 1960 prove what climate models had predicted: warmer oceans contain less oxygen. Oceanographer Lothar Stramma of the University of Kiel in Germany and his colleagues report in Science that an analysis of historical records and recent samples show that as the globe has warmed, waters with low oxygen content have expanded in the tropical Atlantic and equatorial Pacific oceans.

"The oxygen concentrations in these oxygen-minimum zones have decreased with time," says oceanographer and study coauthor Gregory C. Johnson of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, Wash. "The regions of low oxygen have also expanded vertically by both extending deeper into the ocean and closer to the surface."

Fish and other sea life cannot survive in such waters—and this expansion reduces the area where fish can thrive, says oceanographer Janet Sprintall of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif., who also coauthored the study. She notes that fisheries may be affected as well."

Image courtesy of Scientific American

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