A new research has warned that marine species risk mass extinction that rivals anything that’s happened in the Earth’s history over tens of millions of years, following increasing global heating.
The study showed that accelerating climate change is causing a “profound” impact upon ocean ecosystems that is “driving extinction risk higher and marine biological richness lower than has been seen in Earth’s history for the past tens of millions of years”.
It showed that the world’s seawater is steadily climbing in temperature due to the extra heat produced from the burning of fossil fuels, while oxygen levels in the ocean are plunging and the water is acidifying from the soaking up of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
“This means the oceans are overheated, increasingly gasping for breath – the volume of ocean waters completely depleted of oxygen has quadrupled since the 1960s – and becoming more hostile to life,” the research showed.
The new research, published in Science, further found that aquatic creatures such as clams, mussels and shrimp are unable to properly form shells due to the acidification of seawater and all of this means the planet could slip into a “mass extinction rivalling those in Earth’s past.
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In his reaction, Justin Penn, a climate scientist at Princeton University who co-authored the new research said, “Even if the magnitude of species loss is not the same level as this, the mechanism of the species loss would be the same,”.
Continuing, he said “The future of life in the oceans rests strongly on what we decide to do with greenhouse gases today. There are two vastly different oceans we could be seeing, one devoid of a lot of life we see today, depending on what we see with CO2 emissions moving forward.”
Penn said that Fish and marine mammals that live in polar regions are most vulnerable, according to the study, as they will be unable to migrate to suitably cooler climes, unlike tropical species.
The study also found that the threat of climate change is amplifying the other major dangers faced by aquatic life, such as over-fishing and pollution as between 10% and 15% of marine species are already at risk of extinction because of these various threats, the study found, drawing upon International Union for Conservation of Nature data.
Story was adapted from the Guardian.
