We’re Gambling With the Only Good Oceans in the Universe
The ocean off the coast of southern Florida is having a long, hot summer. For weeks, surface temperatures hovered around 90 degrees Fahrenheit, before dropping to the 80s last week. The world’s third-largest barrier reef is dying, and scientists are fishing out coral samples and bringing them to the cool safety of laboratory tanks. One spot along the coastline hit triple-digit temperatures last month, conditions you would expect inside a hot tub. Some coastal Floridians skipped their usual dips in the ocean because it didn’t seem appealing anymore.
Marine heat waves—periods of persistent and anomalously high temperatures of surface seawater—have materialized in other parts of the world too. The surface temperatures of to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Some of that warming is to be expected, because 2023 is . But “all of these marine heat waves are made warmer because of climate change,” Dillon Amaya, a research scientist at NOAA’s Physical Sciences Laboratory, told me. June was already a record-breaking month for the world’s oceans, and then July came along and topped it. According to the experimental forecast system that Amaya and his colleagues run at NOAA, half of the world’s oceans may be in the throes of a heat wave by September.
