Post by Jaga on Dec 3, 2018 6:45:46 GMT -7
and it is a good testing ground
www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/the-baltic-sea-offers-a-preview-of-whats-to-come-with-global-warming/2018/11/29/f52f470a-95c3-11e8-818b-e9b7348cd87d_story.html?utm_term=.049246f71ca1
KIEL, Germany — The herring here — both a symbol of the seaside region and a staple food that locals eat salted, pickled or fried — have plummeted to about a third of their population in the 1990s.
Cod have declined drastically, too. And they are getting smaller and thinner. Scientists have observed fish in their samples whose white fatty underbellies had all but disappeared. “They just looked like they were starving,” marine ecologist Jan Dierking said.
Then came this past summer’s heat wave, which increased Baltic Sea temperatures to an unprecedented 80.6 degrees Fahrenheit, killing starfish and other fragile marine creatures.
It all could be a sign of things to come in a warming world.
The Baltic Sea is a sort of experimental pressure cooker for marine life, a test for how species fare — and whether they can survive at all — in conditions the world’s oceans may soon experience.
“Many of the pressures have hit here much earlier and more intensely than in other world regions,” said Thorsten Reusch, a marine ecologist based here at Germany’s largest ocean research institute.
That is in part due to the Baltic’s small size: It is roughly the size of California, or 1/250th of the Atlantic. It is also tucked between nine countries — including Sweden to the north, Russia to the east and Germany to the south — whose residents pollute and dump waste into, travel over and swim through its delicate marine ecosystems.
As a result, conditions have been changing rapidly. The temperature of the Baltic has risen at roughly three times the average rate of global oceans over the past decade. It has experienced a tenfold expansion of no-oxygen “dead zones” that wipe out fish and their habitats in the past 115 years. And it is seeing increasing levels of acidification.
www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/the-baltic-sea-offers-a-preview-of-whats-to-come-with-global-warming/2018/11/29/f52f470a-95c3-11e8-818b-e9b7348cd87d_story.html?utm_term=.049246f71ca1
www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/the-baltic-sea-offers-a-preview-of-whats-to-come-with-global-warming/2018/11/29/f52f470a-95c3-11e8-818b-e9b7348cd87d_story.html?utm_term=.049246f71ca1
KIEL, Germany — The herring here — both a symbol of the seaside region and a staple food that locals eat salted, pickled or fried — have plummeted to about a third of their population in the 1990s.
Cod have declined drastically, too. And they are getting smaller and thinner. Scientists have observed fish in their samples whose white fatty underbellies had all but disappeared. “They just looked like they were starving,” marine ecologist Jan Dierking said.
Then came this past summer’s heat wave, which increased Baltic Sea temperatures to an unprecedented 80.6 degrees Fahrenheit, killing starfish and other fragile marine creatures.
It all could be a sign of things to come in a warming world.
The Baltic Sea is a sort of experimental pressure cooker for marine life, a test for how species fare — and whether they can survive at all — in conditions the world’s oceans may soon experience.
“Many of the pressures have hit here much earlier and more intensely than in other world regions,” said Thorsten Reusch, a marine ecologist based here at Germany’s largest ocean research institute.
That is in part due to the Baltic’s small size: It is roughly the size of California, or 1/250th of the Atlantic. It is also tucked between nine countries — including Sweden to the north, Russia to the east and Germany to the south — whose residents pollute and dump waste into, travel over and swim through its delicate marine ecosystems.
As a result, conditions have been changing rapidly. The temperature of the Baltic has risen at roughly three times the average rate of global oceans over the past decade. It has experienced a tenfold expansion of no-oxygen “dead zones” that wipe out fish and their habitats in the past 115 years. And it is seeing increasing levels of acidification.
www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/the-baltic-sea-offers-a-preview-of-whats-to-come-with-global-warming/2018/11/29/f52f470a-95c3-11e8-818b-e9b7348cd87d_story.html?utm_term=.049246f71ca1
