![]() Scientists project coral reefs to decline by a further 70% to 90% by 2030 if global warming reaches1.5 degrees.The broader effort to figure out what is living in the ocean at speed and at scale has been boosted with the announcement by the Nippon Foundation - which works to solve global issues through social innovation-and Nekton - a UK research institute - of the largest programme in history to discover new marine life. “There are no baseline data to compare what we are measuring against, so this study that looks at the composition of the fossil record over time is one of the few ways we can try to understand how we are causing the twilight zone to change,” Rocha said.īased on what they discovered from the ancient warming events, the researchers combined that data with Earth system mode simulations - modeling of Earth’s carbon cycle as it moves through the land, sea and atmosphere.įile - IMAGE DISTRIBUTED FOR OCEAN CENSUS - Scientists using deep sea submersibles examine the health of coral reefs off the coast of the Maldives in September 2022 as part of a science mission to map, sample and gather data on ocean health which can inform policy makers both in the Maldives and beyond to understand more about what lives in the global ocean and how impacted it is by increased carbon emissions and overfishing. Rocha, who was not involved in the study, researches the twilight zone and the mesophotic zone just above it, located between 98 and 492 feet (30 and 150 meters) below the surface. Rocha, curator and Follett Chair of Ichthyology at the California Academy of Sciences, worries that changes are underway that haven’t been detected because the twilight zone is so understudied, largely due to a disconnect between funding and the costs of exploring this region. In the ocean's twilight zone, this diver is discovering vibrant new species “The rich variety of twilight zone life evolved in the last few million years, when ocean waters had cooled enough to act rather like a fridge, preserving the food for longer, and improving conditions allowing life to thrive,” Crichton said. Warmer ocean temperatures also increase the metabolic rates of organisms, leading to increased food demand and oxygen consumption, according to the study. ![]() But past warming events caused the material to be degraded more quickly by bacteria, so less of it reached the ocean region. Particles of organic matter from the ocean’s surface drift down and serve as one of the main food sources for life in the twilight zone. “In these warm periods, far fewer organisms lived in the twilight zone, because much less food arrived from surface waters.” ![]() ![]() “We found that the twilight zone was not always a rich habitat full of life,” said study coauthor Paul Pearson, an honorary professor at Cardiff University in the United Kingdom, in a statement. James Cameron's plea to protect the ocean twilight zone The researchers focused on two warm periods that occurred 15 million years ago and 50 million years ago, where even ocean temperatures were “markedly warmer than today,” according to the study. Katherine Crichton, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, in a statement. “We still know relatively little about the ocean twilight zone, but using evidence from the past we can understand what may happen in the future,” said lead study author Dr. The tiny shells effectively create a timeline of how the ocean has changed over millions of years.Ī study detailing the findings was published Thursday in the journal Nature Communications. Over time, the calcium carbonate shells accumulate on the seafloor, preserving information about what the environment was like during their lifetime. The research team studied cores taken from the seafloor that included evidence of preserved microscopic shells from plankton. Paleontologists and ocean scientists teamed up to study the impacts on the ocean’s twilight zone during previous ancient warming events in order to predict how the habitat may respond in the future due to global warming. And if greenhouse gas emissions continue, the researchers estimate that the ocean region’s life could be severely depleted within 150 years - and recovery may not be possible for thousands of years. New research warns that the climate crisis could reduce life in the twilight zone between 20% and 40% by the end of the century. Small crustaceans known as Megacalanus princeps live in the ocean's twilight zone at a depth of 1,000 meters in the Northeast Atlantic. ![]()
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