2023-07-23 14:46:00
“We are in the red at all levels”, warns Marina Levy, research director at the CNRS and deputy director of the Ocean, Climate and Resources department of the IRD. Rising temperatures, lower oxygen and color change…: in these days of heat waves and high temperatures around the world, the waters are also subject to climate change, believes the oceanographer.
Over the past 20 years, more than half of the oceans have changed color, going slightly from blue to green. A color change that would highlight the effect of climate change on ocean life, according to the American and British researchers who published the study in “Nature”. According to their research, the change is due to a variation in ecosystems, and in particular plankton, the centerpiece of the marine food system. Marina Levy, research director at the CNRS and deputy director of the Ocean, Climate and Resources department of the IRD and Sabrina Speich, oceanographer and professor at the ENS, commented on this study for us. “(The fact that the waters are greening) is undoubtedly the manifestation of the change in life at sea in relation to the impact of global warming, and therefore of the warming of the waters”, argues researcher Sabrina Speich.
If it is not possible for the time being to attribute this change of color directly to global warming, other “extreme” phenomena, on the other hand, are. This is the case with sea heat waves, says Marina Levy. “What climate change does is it will accelerate the rate and frequency of these extreme events. There, we saw that it covered half of the North Atlantic and half of the Mediterranean, ”explains Marina Levy.
In 2022, a sea heat wave in the western Mediterranean “lasted several months with temperatures that exceeded seasonal averages by 5°C”, underlines the research director at the CNRS. To reduce these extreme phenomena: “it’s simple, we have to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases of fossil origin”, recalls Sabrina Speich.
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