oceans tagged posts

Before the 30th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30) attracts the world’s attention in November in Belém, in the Brazilian Amazon, an event scheduled for June could set the tone for the negotiations that will take place in the capital of Pará state. The Oceans Conference in Nice, France, will discuss the relationship between the oceans and global climate change.

“It’ll be a place where discussions can take place, where we can integrate different principles from different conventions so that they work in a unified way, rather than in isolation,” pointed out David Obura, chairman of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), during the FAPESP Conference “Contributions to COP30: Ocean, Biodiversity and Climate Nexus,” held on April...

The deeper half of the ocean did not get measurably warmer in the last decade, but surface layers have been warming faster than we thought since the 1970s, two new studies suggest. Because the sea absorbs 90% of the heat caused by human activity, its warmth is a central concern in climate science. The new work suggests that shallow layers bear the brunt of ocean warming.

Scientists compared temperature data, satellite measurements of sea level, and results from climate models. Both the papers appear in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Underestimation

Specifically in the Southern Hemisphere where fewer measurements have been made, a team of researchers from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California investigated long-term warming in the top 700m of the ocean.

They wanted t...

The oceans are more acidic now than they have been for at least 300m years, due to carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels, and a mass extinction of key species may already be almost inevitable as a result, leading marine scientists warned on Thursday. An international audit of the health of the oceans has found that overfishing and pollution are also contributing to the crisis, in a deadly combination of destructive forces that are imperilling marine life, on which billions of people depend for their nutrition and livelihood.

In the starkest warning yet of the threat to ocean health, theInternational Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO) said: “This [acidification] is unprecedented in the Earth’s known history...