If we don't tackle the climate catastrophe, we could be heading towards a loss of life in our oceans that would rival some of the largest extinction events in Earth's history.
The reductions in greenhouse gas emissions needed to avoid a major extinction event are not too late.
They use modeling to predict the consequences of climate change on marine animals and give a plausible explanation for the ocean mystery.
The pattern that we are replicating is similar to the one that occurred during the Great Dying, when volcanic eruptions increased Earth's temperatures by as much as 90 degrees.
Excess heat is changing the chemistry of the ocean and reducing its capacity to hold oxygen, a new study shows.
Changes in marine chemistry will follow ocean acidification, which will wipe out even more species.
Warming is driving marine life towards cooler seas, dropping levels of ocean oxygen globally, and decimating kelp forests in weird blobs of warm water.
In their review of the paper for Science, Rutgers University ecologists explain that climate change is walking species off the ends of the Earth.
Climate change is fifth on the list of the most destructive threats to ocean life, but by the end of the century it will eclipse all the direct human threats combined.
Tropical areas and the North Pacific upwelling systems are near the limit of low oxygen. Around 20 percent of humanity's diet is derived from these areas.
The worst hit will be polar species.
The tropics can tolerate warm, low-O 2 waters, making them resistant to the climate expansion of those conditions, especially for species with high colonization ability, according to Penn and Deutsch.
polar species occupy a disappearing climate niche and lack habitat refugia as the climate warms.
The number of different animal species in our oceans increases from the poles to the tropics, however there is a dip near the equator. The data from these models and the paleontological record show that many species reach their temperature-dependency limit here.
The magnitude of extinction depends on how much CO 2 we emit.
If we limit warming to 2 C, we can reduce extinctions by more than 70 percent, compared to the worst case scenario. The impact of climate change on our oceans would be less threatening if warming was limited to 2.6 degrees C. These scenarios require us to make huge changes.
We are currently on track to avoid the worst-case scenario with current policies.
There are a lot of uncertainties in the model of complex systems, such as how much habitat a marine species can lose before it goes extinct. Adding to the data used to represent marine life would increase the model's accuracy.
When the team used it to model the Great Dying and the catastrophes we are already witnessing, its overall message stacks up.
The liquid world that envelopes 70 percent of our planet is in danger from pollution, as well as from climate change.
The paper was published in Science.
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