Ocean – Page 7 – Desdemona Despair

An ocean heatwave is shown in this map off the coast of New South Wales, Australia, 30 December 2021. Graphic: OceanCurrent

January 6, 2022

Extreme marine heatwave as waters off Sydney set to break temperature records – “It appears now to be reaching record levels and will likely be the hottest January on record”

By Graham Readfearn 4 January 2022 (The Guardian) – Waters off Sydney are undergoing an extreme marine heatwave with temperatures likely at their highest levels on record for January. Satellite data is showing the ocean surface off the coast of Sydney at 3C above normal, with swimmers and surfers reporting conditions that feel more like […]

Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) sea surface temperature (SST) fingerprint. Multimodel mean correlation map between the low-frequency AMOC at 26°N and SST (12). Stars numbered 1 to 16 denote location of sites referred in the figures. The reconstructed AMV at South Sawtooth Lake (1), August temperature in Vøring Plateau off Norway (2), Eastern Fram Strait IRD (3), Atlantic water influence based on C. neoteresis in Western Fram Strait (4), East Greenland Strait N. labradorica (5), North Icelandic shelf temperature based on δ18O from bivalve shells (6), IRD in Denmark Strait (7), the RAPiD-35-COM δ18O T. quinqueloba (8), percentage of Atlantic species in Disko Bugt (9), the RAPID-21-COM sortable silt in the ISOW (10), Gulf of Maine reconstructed SST from bivalve shells (11), titanium (%) in the Cariaco Basin (12), Quelccaya ice record δ18O (13), Huagapo speleothem δ18O (14), and Lake Bosumtwi lake level inferred from δ18O (15). The James Ross Island ice core record with annually resolved δD is shown (16). Graphic: Lapointe and Bradley, 2021 / Science Advances

December 25, 2021

Researchers uncover the surprising cause of the Little Ice Age – “We may be underestimating future ice loss from the Greenland ice sheet”

AMHERST, Massachusetts, 15 December 2021 (University of Massachusetts Amherst) – New research from the University of Massachusetts Amherst provides a novel answer to one of the persistent questions in historical climatology, environmental history and the earth sciences: what caused the Little Ice Age? The answer, we now know, is a paradox: warming. The Little Ice […]

(a) Linear sea surface temperature (SST) trend (°C yr-1) for August of each year from 1982 to 2021. The trend is only shown for values that are statistically significant at the 95 percent confidence interval; the region is shaded gray otherwise. White shading is the August 2021 mean sea ice extent, and the yellow line indicates the median ice edge for Aug 1982-2010, (b, c) Area-averaged SST anomalies (°C) for August of each year (1982-2021) relative to the 1982-2010 August mean for (b) Baffin Bay and (c) Chukchi Sea regions shown by blue boxes in (a). The dotted lines show the linear SST anomaly trends over the period shown and trends in °C yr-1 (with 95 percent confidence intervals) are shown on the plots. Mean August SST warming trends from 1982 to 2021 persist over much of the Arctic Ocean, with statistically significant (at the 95 percent confidence interval) linear warming trends of up to +0.1°C yr-1 (a). Overall, Baffin Bay SSTs are becoming warmer in August with a linear warming trend over 1982-2021 of 0.05 ± 0.01°C yr-1 (b). Similarly, Chukchi Sea August mean SSTs are warming, with a linear trend of 0.06 ± 0.03°C yr-1 (c). Mean August SSTs for the entire Arctic (the Arctic Ocean and marginal seas north of 67° N) exhibit a linear warming trend of 0.03 ± 0.01°C yr-1. Graphic: Timmermans and Labe / NOAA

December 24, 2021

NOAA’s 2021 Arctic Report Card: Rapid and pronounced warming continues to drive the evolution of the Arctic environment

By T. A. Moon, M. L. Druckenmiller, and R. L. Thoman 6 December 2021 (NOAA) – As the influences of human-caused global warming continue to intensify, with the Arctic warming significantly faster than the globe overall, the 2021 Arctic Report Card (ARC2021) brings a broad view of the state of the Arctic climate and environment. […]

Satellite view of the Chinese fishing fleet crossing the Pacific ocean to the coast of Peru, June - September 2021. Data: NASA. Video: AP News

September 27, 2021

Great Wall of Lights: China’s sea power on Darwin’s doorstep – “It really is like the Wild West. Nobody is responsible for enforcement out there.”

By Joshua Goodman 24 September 2021 ABOARD THE OCEAN WARRIOR in the eastern Pacific Ocean (AP) – It’s 3 a.m., and after five days plying through the high seas, the Ocean Warrior is surrounded by an atoll of blazing lights that overtakes the nighttime sky. “Welcome to the party!” says third officer Filippo Marini as […]

A boy looks at the bodies of more than 1400 Atlantic White-Sided dolphins slaughtered on the Skálabotnur beach in the Danish Faroe Islands on 12 September 2021. Photo: Sea Shepherd

September 14, 2021

More than 1,400 dolphins slaughtered in one day in Faroe Islands – “Possibly the largest single hunt of cetaceans ever recorded worldwide”

By Joshua Nevett 14 September 2021 (BBC News) – The practice of dolphin hunting in the Faroe Islands has come under scrutiny after more than 1,400 of the mammals were killed in what was believed to be a record catch. The pod of white-sided dolphins was driven into the largest fjord in the North Atlantic […]

Dead oysters in a commercial oyster bed that were killed by the record heat wave in British Columbia in 2021. When Judy Hicks headed to the beach on 2 July 2021, she discovered that many of her oysters had cracked-open shells, indicating they’d died during the heat wave. From 25 June 2021 to 1 July 2021, during B.C.’s unprecedented “heat dome” that caused hundreds of human fatalities, record-breaking temperatures are estimated to have killed more than one billion sea animals. Photo: Judy Hicks / The Tyee

August 22, 2021

BC’s shellfish farmers struggle after record heatwave decimates oysters – “I have been in this industry for 36 years, and I have never seen a mortality rate like this”

By Vaishnavi Dandekar 5 Aug 2021 (The Tyee) – Judy Hicks, a commercial shellfish grower in Okeover Inlet, B.C., started her day early on July 2. Weather forecasts had predicted that temperatures would reach the mid-20s that day — after hitting the mid-to-high 30s earlier that week — and Hicks wanted to avoid the heat. […]

Map showing trends of early-warning indicators of Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) collapse. a, Linear trends of the corrected restoring rate λ estimated from the HadISST dataset assuming autocorrelated noise. b, Same as (a) but for the EN4 salinity dataset. c, Linear trends of the variance estimated from the HadISST dataset. d, Same as (c) but for the EN4 salinity dataset. e, Linear trends of the AC1 estimated from the HadISST dataset. f, Same as (e) but for the EN4 salinity dataset. Note the high positive values in the northern Atlantic and the subpolar gyre region in particular for λ and AC1, but also in the southern Atlantic ocean where a salinity pileup has recently been associated with an AMOC slowdown. Graphic: Boers, 2021 / Nature Climate Change

August 22, 2021

Gulf Stream could be veering toward irreversible decline, a new analysis warns – Atlantic current “approaching a critical threshold beyond which the circulation system could collapse”

By Ben Turner 6 August 2021 (LiveScience) – One of the most crucial ocean current systems for regulating the Northern Hemisphere’s climate could be on the verge of total collapse due to climate change, a new study has revealed. The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which includes the Gulf Stream and is responsible for moderating […]

Thousands of dead mussels are seen at the waterline in British Columbia, killed by the deadly heatwave 2021. More than one billion marine animals along Canada’s Pacific coast are likely to have died from the record heatwave, experts warn, highlighting the vulnerability of ecosystems unaccustomed to extreme temperatures. Photo: Christopher Harley / The Guardian

July 18, 2021

Heat dome probably killed 1 billion marine animals on Canada coast in 2021 – “A lot of species are not going to be able to keep up with the pace of change”

By Leyland Cecco 8 July 2021 TORONTO (The Guardian) – More than one billion marine animals along Canada’s Pacific coast are likely to have died from last week’s record heatwave, experts warn, highlighting the vulnerability of ecosystems unaccustomed to extreme temperatures. The “heat dome” that settled over western Canada and the north-western US for five days pushed temperatures […]

Satellite view of Tropical Storm Andres on 9 May 2021. Photo: CNN Weather

May 10, 2021

Earliest tropical storm on record develops in the eastern Pacific

By Haley Brink 9 May 2021 (CNN) – The first tropical storm of the 2021 eastern Pacific hurricane season formed off the southwest coast of Mexico on Sunday. Tropical Storm Andres is the earliest tropical storm to ever form during the satellite era in the eastern Pacific, surpassing Adrian in 2017. Andres also holds the […]

Abstract in video format for the paper titled: "Global changes in oceanic mesoscale currents over the satellite altimetry record", Martinez Moreno, J., Hogg, A. McC., England, M. H., Constantinou, N. C., Kiss, A. E., and Morrison, A. K. (2021) Global changes in oceanic mesoscale currents over the satellite altimetry record, 22 Apr 2021. Video: Martinez Moreno, et al., 2021 / Nature Climate Change

April 25, 2021

Changes to giant ocean eddies could have “devastating effects” globally – Scientists find “a global-scale reorganization of the ocean’s energy over the past three decades”

By Graham Readfearn 22 April 2021 (The Guardian) – Twirling and meandering ocean currents that help shape the world’s climate have gone through a “global-scale reorganisation” over the past three decades, according to new research. The amount of energy in these ocean currents, which can be from 10km to 100km across and are known as […]