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A large research synthesis, published in one of the world's most influential scientific journals, has detected a decline in the amount of dissolved oxygen in oceans around the world — a long-predicted result of climate change that could have severe consequences for marine organisms if it continues.
The paper, published Wednesday in the journal Nature by oceanographer Sunke Schmidtko and two colleagues from the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Kiel, Germany, found a decline of more than 2 percent in ocean oxygen content worldwide between 1960 and 2010.
The loss of ocean oxygen "has been assumed from models, and there have been lots of regional analysis that have shown local decline, but it has never been shown on the global scale, and never for the deep ocean," said Schmidtko, who conducted the research with Lothar Stramma and Martin Visbeck, also of GEOMAR.
Because oxygen in the global ocean is not evenly distributed, the 2 percent overall decline means there is a much larger decline in some areas of the ocean than others.
Moreover, the ocean already contains so-called oxygen minimum zones, generally found in the middle depths. The great fear is that their expansion upward, into habitats where fish and other organism thrive, will reduce the available habitat for marine organisms.
In shallower waters, meanwhile, the development of ocean "hypoxic" areas, or so-called "dead zones," may also be influenced in part by declining oxygen content overall.
On top of all of that, declining ocean oxygen can also worsen global warming in a feedback loop. In or near low oxygen areas of the oceans, microorganisms tend to produce nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas. Thus the new study "implies that production rates and efflux to the atmosphere of nitrous oxide ... will probably have increased."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 17 2017, @07:28PM
"world's most influential scientific journals" == "tabloids"
The reports in Nature/Science/PNAS are usually awful if you try to go deeper than simply taking their word for it. They publish "exciting" summaries like the news media rather than reliable and complete stuff like a science journal should. I have no idea how this prestige is maintained in the face of that.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 17 2017, @09:10PM
Because your opinion isn't shared by anybody of consequence.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 17 2017, @10:03PM
I know, its insane. Every scientist figures it out quickly ("you have to read their other papers to guess what they did"), but the administrators and careerists never personally experience that.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by tfried on Saturday February 18 2017, @08:26AM
There is a grain of truth in your criticism. Articles in Nature are so condensed, they are really not useful to anybody who wants to go too deep. They are not discussing, they are stating as fact. Nature did not gather its enormous prestige by being shallow, however. It's renowned for very, very rigid review, and you can safely assume that what you eventually get to see is merely a tenth or less of what gets exchanged between authors, editors and reviewers.
Think of Nature as a ticker of the most important developments in quite a diversity of fields. A really, really high quality ticker, though.