Headline, July 01 2025/ CLIMATE : ''' OCEANS HEAT OCCULT '''

CLIMATE : 

''' OCEANS HEAT OCCULT '''

'' IF WE UNDERSTAND HOW GLOBAL warming is affecting extreme events - that is essential information to try to anticipate what's going on - what's next, '' said Marta Marcos, a physicist at the University of the Balearic Islands in Spain.

Dr. Marcos was the lead author of a recent study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that found that climate change has been responsible for the overwhelming majority of marine heat waves in recent decades.

OCEAN HEAT WAVES SPREAD. High surface temperatures affect marine life, weather and even global sea levels. In recent decades, the oceans have warmed. Marine heat waves, once rare events, have become more common.

One particularly intense event, known as '' the Blob,''  lasted years and devastated plankton populations, starving millions of fish and seabirds and damaging commercial fishing.

Recently, his temperatures have persisted. In January 2024, the share of the ocean surface experiencing a heat wave topped 40 percent.

Unusual heat waves have occurred in all of the major ocean basins around the planet in recent years. And some of these events have become so intense that scientists have coined a new term : super marine heat waves.

The seas off the coasts of Britain and Ireland experienced an unusually intense marine heat wave, one of the longest on record, starting in April, and the temperature rise happened much earlier in the year than usual. Australia and its iconic coral reefs were recently struck by heat waves on two coasts.

Scientists define marine heat waves in different ways. But it's clear that as the planet's climate changes, the oceans are being fundamentally altered, as they absorb excess heat trapped in the atmosphere from greenhouse gases, which are emitted when fossil fuels are burned.

Hotter oceans are causing drastic changes to marine life, sea levels and weather patterns.

Some of the most visible casualties of ocean warming have been coral reefs. When ocean temperatures rise too much, corals can bleach and die.

About 84% of reefs worldwide experienced bleaching-level heat stress at some point between January 2023 and March 2025, according to a recent report.

Last year, the warmest on record, sea levels rose faster than scientists expected. Research showed that most of that rise came from what is known as thermal expansion, the expanding of the water as it warms, not from melting glaciers and ice sheets.

EXCESS HEAT in the oceans can also affect weather patterns, making hurricanes more likely to rapidly intensify and become more destructive. In the southwest Pacific, last year's ocean heat contributed to a record-breaking streak of tropical cyclones hitting the Philippines.

THE LOSSES : Some of the earliest research on mass die-offs associated with marine heat waves,  before there was a name for them, came from the Mediterranean, which has been warming three to five times faster than the ocean at large.

Joaquim Garrabou, a marine conservation ecologist at the Institut de Ciencies del Mar in Barcelona, started studying these events after witnessing a die-off of sponges and coral in 1999.

The Honour and Serving of the Latest Global Operational Research on Oceans and Climate Change, continues. The World Students Society thanks Delger Erdenessanaa and Harry Stevens.

With respectful dedication to Leaders, the Global Founder Framers of !WOW! - the exclusive and eternal ownership of every student in the world - and then Students, Professors and Teachers.

See You all prepare for Great Global Elections on The World Students Society : wssciw.blogspot.com and Twitter X !E-WOW! - The Ecosystem 2011 :

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