New Delhi (NVI): A new study has suggested that the rate of climate change in deep parts of the oceans could accelerate to seven times their current rate after 2050, reports The Guardian.
According to the study, the depths of the oceans are heating up more slowly than the surface and the air, but that will undergo a dramatic shift in the second half of the century.
The study has been published in the journal Nature Climate Change. It has shown that different parts of the ocean undergo change at different rates as the extra heat from increasing levels of greenhouse gases moved through the vast ocean depths, making it increasingly tricky for marine life to adapt.
The findings point towards grim prospects for marine life after looking at a metric called climate velocity. The climate velocity measures the speed and direction a species shifts as their habitat warms, according to Sky News.
Isaac Brito-Morales, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Queensland in Australia, and his team of scientists used data from 11 different climate models to predict what the rest of the 21st century will look like.
Brito-Morales and his team looked at the past 50 years of data and projections for future greenhouse gas emissions.
“This allowed us to compare climate velocity in four ocean depth zones — assessing in which zones biodiversity could shift their distribution the most in response to climate change,” said Brito-Morales, in a University of Queensland statement.
In the study, the researchers looked at future rates of change in three different scenarios, one where emissions start to fall, another where they start to fall by the middle of this century, and a third where emissions continued to rise up to 2100.
The study found “a rapid acceleration of climate change exposure throughout the water column” in the second half of the century, as The Guardian reported.
Professor Jorge García Molinos, a climate ecologist at Hokkaido University’s Arctic Research Center in Japan, and a co-author of the study told The Guardian, “Our results suggest that deep sea biodiversity is likely to be at greater risk because they are adapted to much more stable thermal environments.”
Ocean water surfaces are experiencing climate velocity about twice the rate of the lower regions, so far. Due to this, life in the depths of the ocean has been less affected as compared to coral which are much closer to the surface of the water.
Marine life such as tuna are extremely vulnerable to any slight changes in ocean temeperatures as fish in the depths of the ocean are accustomed to a highly stable environment, The Guardian reported.
