[note: open access study, seems to be models all the way down]
New research finds the ocean’s middle depths, home to many commercially fished species, started losing oxygen at unnatural rates in 2021
AMERICAN GEOPHYSICAL UNION
By 2080, around 70% of the world’s oceans could be suffocating from a lack of oxygen as a result of climate change, potentially impacting marine ecosystems worldwide, according to a new study. The new models find mid-ocean depths that support many fisheries worldwide are already losing oxygen at unnatural rates and passed a critical threshold of oxygen loss in 2021.
Oceans carry dissolved oxygen as a gas, and just like land animals, aquatic animals need that oxygen to breathe. But as the oceans warm due to climate change, their water can hold less oxygen. Scientists have been tracking the oceans’ steady decline in oxygen for years, but the new study provides new, pressing reasons to be concerned sooner rather than later.
The new study is the first to use climate models to predict how and when deoxygenation, which is the reduction of dissolved oxygen content in water, will occur throughout the world’s oceans outside its natural variability.
It finds that significant, potentially irreversible deoxygenation of the ocean’s middle depths that support much of the world’s fished species began occurring in 2021, likely affecting fisheries worldwide. The new models predict that deoxygenation is expected to begin affecting all zones of the ocean by 2080.
The results were published in the AGU journal Geophysical Research Letters, which publishes high-impact, short-format reports with immediate implications spanning all Earth and space sciences.
The ocean’s middle depths (from about 200 to 1,000 meters deep), called mesopelagic zones, will be the first zones to lose significant amounts of oxygen due to climate change, the new study finds. Globally, the mesopelagic zone is home to many of the world’s commercially fished species, making the new finding a potential harbinger of economic hardship, seafood shortages and environmental disruption.
Rising temperatures lead to warmer waters that can hold less dissolved oxygen, which creates less circulation between the ocean’s layers. The middle layer of the ocean is particularly vulnerable to deoxygenation because it is not enriched with oxygen by the atmosphere and photosynthesis like the top layer, and the most decomposition of algae — a process that consumes oxygen — occurs in this layer.
“This zone is actually very important to us because a lot of commercial fish live in this zone,” says Yuntao Zhou, an oceanographer at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and lead study author. “Deoxygenation affects other marine resources as well, but fisheries [are] maybe most related to our daily life.”
The new findings are deeply concerning and adds to the urgency to engage meaningfully in mitigating climate change, says Matthew Long, an oceanographer at NCAR who was not involved in the study.
“Humanity is currently changing the metabolic state of the largest ecosystem on the planet, with really unknown consequences for marine ecosystems,” he said. “That may manifest in significant impacts on the ocean’s ability to sustain important fisheries.”
Evaluating vulnerability
The researchers identified the beginning of the deoxygenation process in three ocean depth zones — shallow, middle and deep — by modeling when the loss of oxygen from the water exceeds natural fluctuations in oxygen levels. The study predicted when deoxygenation would occur in global ocean basins using data from two climate model simulations: one representing a high emissions scenario and the other representing a low emissions scenario.
In both simulations, the mesopelagic zone lost oxygen at the fastest rate and across the largest area of the global oceans, although the process begins about 20 years later in the low emissions scenario. This indicates that lowering carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions could help delay the degradation of global marine environments.
The researchers also found that oceans closer to the poles, like the west and north Pacific and the southern oceans, are particularly vulnerable to deoxygenation. They’re not yet sure why, although accelerated warming could be the culprit. Areas in the tropics known for having low levels of dissolved oxygen, called oxygen minimum zones, also seem to be spreading, according to Zhou.
“The oxygen minimum zones actually are spreading into high latitude areas, both to the north and the south. That’s something we need to pay more attention to,” she says. Even if global warming were to reverse, allowing concentrations of dissolved oxygen to increase, “whether dissolved oxygen would return to pre-industrial levels remains unknown.”
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*****
Paper title:
“Emerging Global Ocean Deoxygenation Across the 21st Century”
Authors:
- Yuntao Zhou (corresponding author) and Hongjing Gong, School of Oceanography, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China
- Chao Li, Key Laboratory of Geographic Information Science (Ministry of Education), East China Normal University, Shanghai, China; School of Geographic Sciences, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China
JOURNAL
Geophysical Research Letters
DOI
ARTICLE TITLE
Emerging Global Ocean Deoxygenation Across the 21st Century
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
19-Nov-2021
Disclaimer: AAAS and Eurek
From EurekAlert!
Smells fishy to me 🙂
Yes. Climate change has likely begun to smell fishy many years ago… as with all pestilences, the smell doesn’t likely stop to increase.
What a bunch of carp
How did fish survive the Holocene Climatic Optimum, the Eemian and even warmer and longer prior interglacials? Let alone the PETM and hotter Eocene.
But this time it’s different!!!!!
/sarc
And worse than we thought!
And its all our fault.
I blame the Russians,
Donald Trump
white supremacists
and even worse,
the unvaxxed.
And it’s occurring in fisheries twice as fast as in the rest of the world.
That’s it! The fish are using up the oxygen.
Stop making CO2 or the fish get it … from the mafia.
Worse than worse than we thought.
Worse than we thought is so 2021 — get with the program for 2022
Worse than we are even capable of thinking!
Wow! I never thought of that!
twice as worse!
We are approaching the worsest scenario for the oceans.
Peak worseness.
peak wokeness
…and we’re running out of time!
I’m running out of scotch.
More importantly, how did the oceans survive hundreds of millions of years of tropical conditions, in which the poles were free of ice year-round, and the oceans warm from top to bottom?
More importantly, when did all the tropical fish die.
They follow the waters that are most suitable for them. Homarus vulgarisms (the common lobster) move up and down, roughly around Cape Hatteras, as the ocean warms and cools, respectively. Palinurus (spiney lobster) cannot stand cold water and only go so far north along the eastern seaboard before the cooler temperature and occupation by Homarus stops them
Well, that’s fine for crustaceans, being able to move around and find better quarters, but think of the poor fish; they can’t just pack up and move when conditions don’t suit them, but just have to sit there and take it.
Surely that’s the way it is, or the sciencey paper would have outed that idea, right?
According to climate scientists, the oceans have warmed a whopping 0.03C degrees +/- 0.15C.
They sure have good instruments.
Quantum instruments capable of spooky interactions instantaneously at infinite distances — it they don’t get tangled in their fishing lines.
Pfffft instruments are so 19th century.
Today, cutting edge global oceanic research uses models and is based on homogenised data based on tree rings of lemon trees, planted in pots and located next to 29 backyard pools in Akron Ohio.
Plus the equipment to run the models can also hit 120fps in COD! Try that with a thermal couple.
catastrophic!
Another 1/100th of a degree and we can start catching cooked fish!
That’s what I was thinking….not only recent warm periods but how about when dinosaurs walked the earth? We know from fossils that the seas were full of marine reptiles like plesiosaurs, plilosaurs and icthyosaurs. But if there were so few fish due to high temps, then what on earth did these marine predators eat?
Each other?
Yes, they did eat each other, but mostly fish and shellfish.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2487652/amp/Mosasaurs-cannibals-Marine-reptile-fossil-THREE-creatures-inside-stomach-confirms-theory.html
Cretaceous seas were much hotter than now, yet fish were plentiful.
And in the Jurassic lived the largest known ray-finned fish:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leedsichthys
The mosasaurs would jump out of the water and catch unsuspecting therapods strolling along the beach. I know that to be true because I saw it in a Hollywood documentary.
The Earth was objectively better off during warm periods than cold – and we’re in a milder cold period. The biosphere is aching to get back to the Optimum.
They didn’t!
Today’s coelacanths look a lot like their Mesozoic ancestors.
They didn’t. They all died, and so now we live in a fishless world, didn’t you know?
I guess that means the Chinese fishing fleets are off the hook.
The objective of the study?
It’s not Chicom overfishing, it’s climate change.
Here, off South America’s Southern Cone’s Pacific and Atlantic coasts, they’re wiping out the squid, having already depleted the Western Pacific.
There you have it in a nutshell. Weasel words and pseudo “evidence” pulled from the excrement of “model” output. In other words, they put all their incorrect, bullshit assumptions into a computer model which then spat out a reflection of all the incorrect input assumptions.
Nobody should “Believe in Science” when this is what passes for it these days.
What change in climate increases temps in 1000m depth ?
Sun ???
No way…
Wait, models, CO2 ? 😀
“It finds that significant, potentially irreversible deoxygenation of the ocean’s middle depths that support much of the world’s fished species began occurring in 2021, likely affecting fisheries worldwide. The new models predict that deoxygenation is expected to begin affecting all zones of the ocean by 2080.”
This paragraph is even more out of it in that “irreversible” follows “potentially”. their “new models” can’t predict anything.
It translates to: We detected a decrease in oxygen one year ago, and assume that this will continue forever. Wouldn’t want these people to be my stock broker.
Alarmists think trends go on forever.
They can predict the probability of getting published.
“deoxygenation is expected to begin affecting all zones of the ocean by 2080.”
This ‘to begin’ date was chosen due to the youngest of our group is now 25, and by 2080 will be well into retirement eligible.
Exactly. Models are not “science” per se. They are hypotheses. AND need to be tested via the SCIENTIFIC METHOD.
“A scientific hypothesis must be falsifiable, implying that it is possible to identify a possible outcome of an experiment or observation that conflicts with predictions deduced from the hypothesis; otherwise, the hypothesis cannot be meaningfully tested.”
“the excrement of “model” output”!!!
Awesome -just awesome!
“… under the RCP8.5 scenario”
I’m not sure why you actually refer junk like this to us.🤔🤔
for laughs….
Yup. Nothing more ridiculous than model junkies doubling down on junk…junk models forced by junk RCPs to come to junk conclusions.
Regards,
Bob
climate change junkies
Exactly.
It is wise to be aware of stupid.
It provides us an opportunity to openly mock the leftists and shine light on how corrupt some researchers have become.
The RCP8.5 scenario is a disgrace when invoked it can be stated they are not describing the extreme possible outcome but simply lying.
The RCP’s were established in the 1980’s we are a third through the period of projection and we are running below RCP2.6 this is dishonest propaganda we have it continuously in the NZ press who most closely resemble the media of the former USSR
This paper belongs in the garbage zone.
Journal of Irreducible Results.
Was is collected in the Great Plastic Island off California?
How much does the sea temperature at 2?00 to 1000 m increase in response to a 1.5C increase in atmospheric temperature? At those depths (and pressures) oxygen saturation goes way up, so the amount of O2 available for respiration goes way up as well. This does not pass my BS meter.
Now hold on there partner — “models find” or “measurements found?”
How can a model find anything? At best, the models make projections. There are no findings. Models do not output facts or data.
Models find exactly what they are programed to find.
And not an actual measurement in sight.
As usual, we stop reading at ‘models’…
Only ## El Sol can warm the ocean.
Certainly rain that falls on increasingly desertified lands will be warmer when it reaches the ocean but will float on the top, not only because of its warmth but that it is ‘fresh’
When it does it will cool and in doing so, heat the air immediately above the ocean’s surface.
Mmmm, wonder if Spencer’s Sputnik is seeing that?
## Climate Science can warm the ocean and in the name/shape of a guy answering to “Karl” did exactly that.
Karl binned the data from the ARGO floats when it wasn’t ‘going his way’
He then used data from ship’s engines intakes instead and then: Retired.
So as to avoid the flak he knew he’d rightfully receive.
And, when they are wrong, they’ll demand more money to “study the problem”.
Another contender for the junk science of the year oscars
“But as the oceans warm due to climate change, their water can hold less oxygen.”
Thankfully Henry’s Law is selective and doesn’t hold for CO2…
/sarc
“By 2080, around 70% of the world’s oceans could be suffocating from a lack of oxygen as a result of climate change, potentially impacting marine ecosystems worldwide, according to a new study.”
“Could” implies it also “Could not”.
These guys know a lot about oceans, so it is dangerous to comment. But, why no mention of actual temperatures? They were this and now they are that…Then O2 concentrations were this and they are now that…Warmer oceans hold more O2, but the polar waters are especially vulnerable. All of this may be correct, but I distrust “models” in more or less any context! Maybe someone can supply what I see as missing data…
Salute!
Many thanks, Dr Ken.
Show me the data from actual measurements over the years, a;though those from a thousand yeaars ago are not available.
“losing oxygen at unnatural rates and passed a critical threshold of oxygen loss in 2021”
BEAM ME UP! What is “natural”?
I apparently missed my calling and did actual test engineering and did not get endless grants to do more studies.
Gums sends…
What data? Models don’t provide DATA! They provide outputs that are programmed and provided by the user.
It is quite extraordinary that they failed to mention that all fish went extinct during the Eemian, and new fish species had to evolve from scratch in the following 100k years.
As the oceans have been warmer many times over the last million years or so, and most lately the Holocene Optimum, it is hard to claim a real stress on the oceans here. Just as polar bears have survived ALL interglacials (and glacials), warming has not been a problem.
They also forget that most of the oxygen in the oceans is made by phytoplankton, so the source is in the oceans. They might produce less oxygen when colder, but then most organisms (poikilotherms) also need less when colder as well. However, with warming these oxygen producing organisms, as well as land plants, will up their game and make even more oxygen, as everybody (poikilotherms and homeotherms) needs more oxygen with warming.
Climate science in a nut shell.
Find a three month trend.
Project that trend out 50 years.
Proclaim looming disaster.
Ask for funds for more research.
Get interviewed by The Guardian.
Have you noticed that The Guardian refers to anyone who is not a Democrat as “far right”?
Is that because when you’re as far on the left spectrum as The Guardian is, anyone who is even a bit center is seen by them as far to their right?
And an endorsement testimonial from someone who claims she can see an invisible gas.
The irony of the whole situation is that in a sane world these people should be laughed off the stage.
Find a tend? Hell, create a trend! It pays the same and a lot less work and zero risk of failure.
Oh for crying out loud! They didn’t actual get out of the office & go out and measure the O2, they used a model to “find” this conclusion.
Time to just shut the universities down; they are worse than useless, all misinformation all the time.
“…just shut the universities down…”
No need. As their
victimsstudents increasingly realise they are unlikely to get a job, they will increasingly opt for apprenticeships instead.they will increasingly opt for apprenticeships instead.
Doubtful. That would require REAL work.
this story uses words and phrases like,
By 2080,
around 70%,
potentially impacting,
The new models,
unnatural rates,
critical threshold,
climate models to predict,
and my favorite
return to pre-industrial levels remains unknown.”
i would like to know what type of instrumentation hardware was used to collect the data. they never talk about the instruments used. i think this is important. or was it all done with models? this publication is nothing but artwork. i am sick of it and starting to loose it. now excuse me while i go outdoors and clear my driveway from snow with a 21′ mtd snowblower powered by a 6hp tecumseh 2 cycle gas fueled engine.
joe
I think fish know more about their environment than these guys.
When Charles Rotter posts carbon fraudery on WUWT, the intelligent comments can be used by the fraudsters to hone their devious skills.
Qué ?
I noticed the authors. They’re Chinese – not there’s anything wrong with that.
It seems that most articles that come to the conclusion that we must stop using fossil fuels have a least one Chinese name attached.
Rest assured that their science doesn’t last long. You’ll be hungry for more within minutes.
Love it! Chow man!
They don’t seem to know about the convergence zones, only one paper (1983) before 2000. “Oxygenation only occurs in some coastal waters, the tropical ocean, the northern North Atlantic Ocean, and the Arctic Ocean….Preindustrial control simulations were used ….Note that we also provide uncertainties…(15 and 50 years).”
Is the reason that they start at 2000 have to do with this?–“A surprising feature of these results is that, even with a significantly improved dataset, the exact time of separation of a ring remains elusive……It is well known that determining the true uncertainty of geophysical spectra is fraught with problems. We often deal more with hope than with confidence.” Sturges, W. and R. Leben. 2000. Frequency of ring separations from the Loop Current in the Gulf of Mexico: A revised estimate. J. Phys. Ocn.30:1814-1819 .
https://doi.org/10.1175/1520-0485(2000)030<1814:FORSFT>2.0.CO;2
Models all the way down (to the sea floor).