Climate change and the ocean
Climate change has serious, long-term, and far-reaching negative consequences for our ocean.
Burning fossil fuels, raising livestock, and clearing forests are just three examples of human activities that release billions of tons of CO2 and other heat-trapping gases into our atmosphere every year, making our planet warmer. The ocean has buffered us from the worst impacts of climate change—absorbing more than 25 percent of the excess CO2 and more than 90 percent of the excess heat. But these climate services come at a significant cost for marine ecosystems and result in harmful impacts including:
- Increasing ocean temperature: bleaches coral reefs, shifts where fish can live, and decreases ocean wildlife,
- Ocean acidification: causes a depletion of carbonate ions, which are critical for shell-forming animals like oysters, crabs, and shrimp,
- Decreasing oxygen: creates areas that suffocate marine animals, shrinks their habitats, and forces them to swim into places where they are more vulnerable to predators,
- More intense tropical storms and higher sea level: puts coastal communities in harm’s way and destroys coastal wetland habitats which include mangroves and salt marshes.
These and other negative impacts are documented and summarized in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate—released on September 25, 2019, in Monaco. It is the first IPCC report to focus specifically on the marine realm.
In order to protect the ocean and slow the impacts of climate change, the science indicates we need to take action on two fronts:
- Cut net carbon dioxide emissions to zero by 2050;
- Increase ocean health—by reducing pollution, overfishing and safeguarding critical marine and coastal habitats.
MBARI climate change research
MBARI’s technical achievements and knowledge are transforming climate change research with novel methods and technologies. Several MBARI research projects have tackled issues related to climate change, seeking to understand how marine life responds to a changing ocean.
Additional MBARI climate change research:
- 500 new floats to expand global ocean monitoring program
- 30 years of research on the abyssal plain provides clues to climate change
- Lending expertise in the pursuit of clean energy off the California coast
- Measuring the impact of climate change on coral reefs
- Building tools to learn about the many faces of ocean change
- Decades of exploration and discovery yield insights to life in the midwater
- Using an autonomous sailboat to study the exchange of carbon dioxide at the ocean surface
Climate change research from MBARI partners:
VIDEO: New technology for studying ocean change
VIDEO: Life on the edge
“Environmental conditions throughout the world ocean are changing in response to fossil fuel emissions and greenhouse warming in the atmosphere.”
MBARI Publications
- Time-of-detection as a metric for prioritizing between climate observation quality, frequency, and duration
- Metrics for the evaluation of the Southern Ocean in coupled climate models and Earth system models
- Harnessing marine microclimates for climate change adaptation and marine conservation
- Climate variability and change: Response of a coastal ocean ecosystem
- Combined climate- and prey-mediated range expansion of Humboldt squid (Dosidicus gigas), a large marine predator in the California Current System
- Oceanographic and biological effects of shoaling of the oxygen minimum zone
- Extreme plasticity in life-history strategy allows a migratory predator (jumbo squid) to cope with a changing climate
- Deep ocean communities impacted by changing climate over 24 y in the abyssal northeast Pacific Ocean
- Climate change impacts on marine ecosystems
- Conservation of deep pelagic biodiversity
- Invasive range expansion by the Humboldt squid, Dosidicus gigas, in the eastern North Pacific
- Climate-related long-term faunal changes in a California rocky intertidal community