Marine heatwaves are spreading around the world

Straits Times

5 hours ago

In recent decades, the oceans have warmed. Marine heat waves, once rare events, have become more common.
One particularly intense event known as 'the Blob' lasted years and devastated plankton populations, starving millions of fish and seabirds and damaging commercial fishing.
Recently, high temperatures have persisted. In January 2024, the share of the ocean surface experiencing a heat wave topped 40 per cent.
Unusual heat waves have occurred in all of the major ocean basins around the planet in recent years. And some of these events have become so intense that scientists have coined a new term: super marine heat waves.
'The marine ecosystems where the super marine heat waves occur have never experienced such a high sea surface temperature in the past,' Dr Boyin Huang, an oceanographer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said in an email.
The seas off the coasts of the United Kingdom and Ireland experienced an unusually intense marine heat wave, one of the longest on record, starting in April, and the temperature rise happened much earlier in the year than usual. Australia and its iconic coral reefs were recently struck by heat waves on two coasts.
Scientists define marine heat waves in different ways. But it's clear that as the planet's climate changes, the oceans are being fundamentally altered as they absorb excess heat trapped in the atmosphere from greenhouse gases, which are emitted when fossil fuels are burned.
Hotter oceans are causing drastic changes to marine life, sea levels and weather patterns.
Some of the most visible casualties of ocean warming have been coral reefs. When ocean temperatures rise too much, corals can bleach and die. About 84 per cent of reefs worldwide experienced bleaching-level heat stress at some point between January 2023 and March 2025, according to a recent report.
In 2024, the warmest on record, sea levels rose faster than scientists expected. Research showed that most of that rise in sea levels came from ocean water expanding as it warms, which is known as thermal expansion, not from melting glaciers and ice sheets, which in past years were the biggest contributors to rising seas.
Excess heat in the oceans can also affect weather patterns, making hurricanes more likely to rapidly intensify and become more destructive. In the southwest Pacific, 2024's ocean heat contributed to a record-breaking streak of tropical cyclones hitting the Philippines.
'If we understand how global warming is affecting extreme events, that is essential information to try to anticipate what's going on, what's next,' said Dr Marta Marcos, a physicist at the University of the Balearic Islands in Spain.
Dr Marcos was the lead author of a recent study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that found that climate change has been responsible for the overwhelming majority of marine heat waves in recent decades.
The losses
Some of the earliest research on mass die-offs associated with marine heat waves, before there was a name for them, came from the Mediterranean, which has been warming three to five times faster than the ocean at large. Dr Joaquim Garrabou, a marine conservation ecologist at the Institut de Ciencies del Mar in Barcelona, Spain, started studying these events after witnessing a die-off of sponges and coral in 1999.
He and other scientists believed that with climate change, these die-offs would reoccur. 'The reality is moving even faster than what we thought,' he said. 'Having these mass mortality events is the new normal, instead of something infrequent, which it should be.'
In 2012, a marine heat wave in the Gulf of Maine highlighted the risk these events pose to fisheries. The Northern shrimp population went from an estimated 27.25 billion in 2010 to 2.8 billion two years later, according to modeling by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission.
'This disappearance of the shrimp was just shocking,' said Dr Anne Richards, a retired research fisheries biologist who worked at NOAA's Northeast Fisheries Science Center at the time.
Her research pointed to a significant culprit: Longfin squid drawn north by warmer water were eating the shrimp.
The fishery has not yet reopened. By 2023, the Northern shrimp population was estimated to have dropped to around 200 million.
Commercial fishing has always been difficult, but now, 'climate change is taking that to another level,' said Dr Kathy Mills, a senior scientist at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute.
Complicating matters is the fact that much of the research on marine heat waves comes from just a few countries, including Australia, the United States, China, Canada, Spain and the United Kingdom.
'There are lots of regions around the world where monitoring isn't as good as other places, and so we don't really know what's happening,' said Dr Dan Smale, a community ecologist at the United Kingdom's Marine Biological Association.
Rising ocean temperatures can also set off a domino effect through the marine food web, starting at the bottom with plankton.
Since the end of most commercial whaling in the 1970s and '80s, humpback whales in the North Pacific had been recovering, reaching a peak population of about 33,000 in 2012.
But then came the heat event known as 'the Blob' that blanketed much of region from 2014 to 2017. The heat wave diminished wind and waves, limiting the nutrients that typically get churned up to the sea surface. Fewer nutrients meant fewer phytoplankton, fewer zooplankton, fewer fish and fewer of everything else that eats them.
How 'the Blob' took a toll
After the Blob dissipated, researchers learned that the effects of a severe marine heat wave could endure long after the event itself has passed.
Mr Ted Cheeseman, a doctoral candidate at Southern Cross University, had co-founded Happywhale, a database of tens of thousands of marine mammals built on photos submitted by researchers and whale watchers around the world. Mr Cheeseman found a sharp drop in humpback whale sightings by 2021.
The decrease was so significant, at first he thought the Happywhale team was doing the math wrong. The team members spent several years checking and last year published a study that concluded the humpback whale population in the North Pacific had fallen by 20 per cent from 2012 to 2021. They attributed the decline to the loss of food like krill during and after the Blob.
With 'an estimate of 7,000 whales having disappeared and not showing up anywhere else,' Mr Cheeseman said, 'there's really no other explanation.'
Looking ahead
Eventually, parts of the ocean might enter a constant state of marine heat wave, at least by today's common definition. Some scientists see today's shorter-term spikes as practice for this future.
Dr Alistair Hobday, a biological oceanographer at Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, has been conducting public briefings with marine heat wave forecasts months ahead of time.
People are tuning in – and responding.
The critically endangered red handfish lives off the coast of Tasmania, crawling along the seafloor on fins shaped like hands. These unusual fish have only been found within two small patches of rocky reef and sea grass meadow.
In late 2023, Hobday's forecast predicted potentially deadly marine heat waves. Researchers from the University of Tasmania's Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, with support from the Australian Department of Climate Change, took a drastic step. They transferred 25 red handfish to an aquarium until the temperatures fell.
Dr Jemina Stuart-Smith, an ecologist at the University of Tasmania, described those weeks as the most stressful time of her life. 'If it all went wrong,' she said, 'you're talking about the potential extinction of an entire species.'
After three months, 18 fish were returned to the ocean. Three had died, and four were enrolled in a captive breeding program.
Scientists recognise that temporary fixes can only do so much in the face of long-term warming.
'It's kind of putting a Band-Aid on a broken leg,' said Dr Kathryn Smith, a marine ecologist and postdoctoral researcher at the Marine Biological Association.
But those studying today's extreme events still hope their work gives people some visibility into the future of the world's oceans, Dr Hobday said. 'Clever people, if you tell them about the future,' he said, 'can think of all kinds of things to do differently.' NYTIMES
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