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Florida Just Recorded The Hottest Ocean Temperatures In History 

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This summer has been breaking heat records all over the world. Most recently, Florida saw an ocean temperature reading of 101.1 degrees Fahrenheit on Monday, and 100.2 degrees on Sunday. The previous world record for hottest ocean temperature was 99.7 degrees in Kuwait Bay, according to a study from 2020. 

“This is shocking, it’s unprecedented, it’s actually quite frightening.” Stefanie Sekich, of the Surfrider Foundation, an ocean-protection advocacy group, told Yahoo News.

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July as a whole has seen the record for the hottest average global temperature broken multiple times as a result of climate change which has caused a multitude of heat waves across the country. 

The oceans have absorbed 90% of the increased heat from climate change, leading to global ocean surface temperatures to reach the highest temperature ever in 174 years of data. 

“These ocean temperatures over the globe have been increasing for the past month. In the North Atlantic, parts of Europe have seen the ocean temperature increase of 7 degrees [Fahrenheit] more than it usually is at this time of year,” Sekich said. 

One of the negative impacts to the ocean’s many ecosystems is coral bleaching, in the US specifically, Florida has been experiencing severe bleaching events since July. Coral bleaching occurs when the corals release algae due to warmer temperatures, causing the coral to turn white. 

On July 20th, the Coral Restoration Foundation reported that Sombrero Reef, near the Florida Keys, experienced a coral bleaching event with a 100% mortality rate. 

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“On July 20th, CRF teams visited Sombrero Reef, a restoration site we’ve been working at for over a decade. What we found was unimaginable — 100% coral mortality. We have also lost almost all the corals in the Looe Key Nursery in the Lower Keys,” said Phanor Montoya-Maya, restoration program manager at Coral Restoration Foundation, in a statement. 

“Sea grasses are another vital ecosystem, they’re an essential fish habitat, they’re the primary food source for manatees, which have been plummeting in recent years. Sea grasses are very vulnerable to warmer waters,” Chris Robbins, associate director of science at Oceans Conservancy, an environmental advocacy group, told Yahoo News.

“The last time we saw a massive seagrass die-off resulting from high water temperatures, high salinities, low oxygen was during the El Nino event in 2015, and of course we’re now in an El Nino event in 2023,” said Robbins.

When it comes to what we can do in order to improve, Sekich explained that “obviously, we need to get off fossil fuels. If we keep putting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere we’re going to keep seeing these effects of climate change.”

Robbins also explained how the state and federal governments need to take charge and implement policies and infrastructure investments to reduce pollution and decrease the use of fertilizer and upgrading wastewater systems.

“If and when these things happen, we’ll potentially need to reduce other stressors on these systems,” Robbins said.

Great Barrier Reef

How Coral Bleaching In The Great Barrier Reef Has Impacted Its Inhabitants

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Climate Change has caused countless environments throughout the world to be destroyed, ecosystems to change, and species to face endangerment/extinction. The Great Barrier Reef in Australia has faced some of the greatest challenges throughout the past decade, and now, its enduring its third mass bleaching event within five years.

The last time the reef endured a mass bleaching event as intense as this one is gearing up to be, a third of all corals were killed, and fish populations declined rapidly, which also caused the specific ecosystems/species within the reef to change for the worse as well. A recent study wanted to analyze what actual effects these bleaching events have on the fish species that live among the coral reefs, as that could help us better prevent these types of things from occurring in other reefs around the world.

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The scientists behind the international study used something called “gene expression” as a tool to understand how well fish are able to handle hotter temperatures, which is an effect of coral bleaching. According to the study, gene expression is “the process where a gene is read by cell machinery and creates a product such as a protein, resulting in a physical trait.” Using this process, scientists were able to predict which fish species would specifically be the most at risk/affected by repeated heat waves that lead to bleaching. 

The study initially began in 2015 when the researchers collected liver biopsies from several species of coral reef fish after global ocean temperatures increased by 1 degree Celsius that year, however, at the time the team of scientists had no idea how different everything would look in just 5 years; in terms of coral bleaching, ocean temperatures/acidification, and climate change in general. 

It wasn’t until one year later that things took a turn for the worse. In 2016, Jodie Remmer, a lead author on the study, along with one other researcher on the project went to the Great Barrier Reef to work on a completely different project when they realized that the ocean temperature around them read as 33°C. This was absolutely shocking in the worst way possible, as 33°C was the same temperature that Remmer claims to have been used in a climate change simulation where scientists predicted what the world would look like, environment wise, by the year 2100, meaning climate change has intensified to a much more urgent level than anyone expected by 2016.

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After one week, Remmer claimed they watched entire patches of coral reef turn bone-white, as fish populations abandoned their homes in search of new resources for food. During that time, scientists collected genetic samples from a multitude of fish and coral species. What they were looking for is how these species “switched their genes on and off” based on environmental conditions. Some genes should always be on, and others should be regulated and used as a response to things like temperature stress (like during a bleaching event). 

The ability to turn these genes on and off is what gives all species the ability to maintain proper metabolic, respiratory, and immune responses to environmental changes. When this gene expression is compromised, so is the ability to survive, hence the massive decline in coral reef ecosystems/fish populations. 

“Our findings not only have implications for specific fish species, but for the whole ecosystem. So policymakers and the fishing industry should screen more species to predict which will be sensitive and which will tolerate warming waters and heatwaves. This is not a ‘one size fits all’ situation. Fish have been on the planet for more than 400 million years. Over time, they may adapt to rising temperatures or migrate to cooler waters. But, the three recent mass bleaching events are unprecedented in human history, and fish won’t have time to adapt,” Remmer stated. 

Remmer went on to say that her and her team’s goal has always been to protect the ocean and all of its inhabitants as much as possible. This new information and data isn’t very encouraging, however, it does give scientists and the government the sense of urgency they often need in order to justify a global response.