Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumOceans Getting Hotter Than Anybody Realized
The RV Kaharoa motored out of Wellington, New Zealand on Saturday, loaded with more than 100 scientific instruments, each eventually destined for a watery grave. Crewmembers will spend the next two months dropping the 50-pound devices, called Argo floats, into the seas between New Zealand and Mauritius, off the coast of Madagascar. There, the instruments will sink and drift, then measure temperature, salinity and pressure as they resurface to beam the data to a satellite. The battery-powered floats will repeat that process every 10 days until they conk out, after four years or more, and become ocean junk.
Under an international program begun in 2000, and that started producing useful global data in 2005, the worlds warming and acidifying seas have been invisibly filled with thousands of these bobbing instruments. They are gathering and transmitting data thats providing scientists with the clearest-ever pictures of the hitherto-unfathomed extent of ocean warming. About 90 percent of global warming is ending up not on land, but in the oceans.
Research published Sunday concluded that the upper 2,300 feet of the Southern Hemispheres oceans may have warmed twice as quickly after 1970 than had previously been thought. Gathering reliable ocean data in the Southern Hemisphere has historically been a challenge, given its remoteness and its relative paucity of commercial shipping, which helps gather ocean data. Argo floats and satellites are now helping to plug Austral ocean data gaps, and improving the accuracy of Northern Hemisphere measurements and estimates.
The Argo data is really critical, said Paul Durack, a Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researcher who led the new study, which was published in Climate Nature Change. The estimates that we had up until now have been pretty systematically underestimating the likely changes.
http://www.climatecentral.org/news/oceans-getting-hotter-than-anybody-realized-18139
daleanime
(17,796 posts)Xipe Totec
(43,890 posts)I can't even begin to tell you how much I spent to populate that thing, or how much care and nurturing it took to keep that aquarium going.
One fine winter day I didn't close the back door to my house right, and a north wind blew the door open and chilled the house. Temperatures dropped in the tank by one degree. That's one degree Fahrenheit.
Within three days the corals began jettisoning their chloroplasts. Within a week, they were all dead.
All dead due to a one degree drop in temperature.
I've never kept a salt water aquarium since then. Too sensitive and I don't want to contribute to depleting the coral beds for my amusement.
One degree, that's all it took to kill them.
defacto7
(13,485 posts)knowing what warming oceans mean to all life on earth. The ocean made us, the ocean can reclaim us.
navarth
(5,927 posts)It is so sad, sad, sad what we are doing to ourselves and all the innocent species around us. Sad.