Wired News has an article about how warmer ocean temperatures are impacting ecosystems in the Pacific.
The failure of last year’s Pacific upwelling killed seabirds from California to British Columbia. Scientists had hoped the change was just a natural temperature fluctuation in what is known as the California Current.
But the return of higher ocean temperatures and scarce food resources this year has scientists wondering whether last year’s erratic weather was not a fluke but the emergence of a troubling trend.
LiveScience reports on thumb sized sea creatures called salps, which are thought to play a key role in transporting greenhouse gases deep into the oceans.
Madin and his colleagues have now estimated that “hotspots” of salps could spell a dead-end for carbon, transporting tons of it daily from the ocean surface to the deep sea and preventing it from re-entering the atmosphere and contributing again to the greenhouse effect and possibly to global warming.