Marine heatwave pushes up Mediterranean Sea temperature
The EU's Copernicus Climate Change Service said Copernicus Marine Service data showed sea surface temperatures on June 22 were more than 5 degrees Celsius above the seasonal average.
The most intense warming in what it called a "marine heatwave" was observed in the western Mediterranean basin, including the Balearic Sea, off Spain, and the Tyrrhenian Sea, off the west coast of Italy, it said.
"We have seen temperatures we were expecting in the middle of August being recorded in June and ... this is why it is considered a record year for temperatures in the Mediterranean Sea," Christos Spyrou, associate researcher at the Academy of Athens research centre for atmospheric physics, said.
He said that the average sea temperatures in June were 3-6 degrees higher than the average between 1982-2023, which was used as a reference period.
"We expected these sea temperatures in August," Spyrou said, adding specific temperatures were not yet available.
"Some species will not be able to reproduce or survive in these conditions, especially in increasing temperatures.'
Europe is the world's fastest-warming continent, heating up at twice the global average, according to Copernicus, making extreme heatwaves occur earlier in the year, and persist into later months.
Several Italian regions banned outdoor work during the hottest hours of the day on Tuesday, France shut scores of schools and Spain confirmed last month as its hottest June on record as a severe heatwave gripped Europe, triggering widespread health alerts.
A 69-year-old Greek resident who gave his name as Christos said he had noticed the warming waters off Athens.
'I have been coming here for 11 years, I believe the sea is a little warmer than other years. Every year it gets warmer, both in winter and in summer," he said REUTERS
Find out more about climate change and how it could affect you on the ST microsite here.
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Straits Times
4 days ago
- Straits Times
Marine heatwave pushes up Mediterranean Sea temperature
ATHENS - Mediterranean Sea temperatures surged in June in a marine heatwave, with a Greek scientist warning some species are under threat in what has likely been a record period. The EU's Copernicus Climate Change Service said Copernicus Marine Service data showed sea surface temperatures on June 22 were more than 5 degrees Celsius above the seasonal average. The most intense warming in what it called a "marine heatwave" was observed in the western Mediterranean basin, including the Balearic Sea, off Spain, and the Tyrrhenian Sea, off the west coast of Italy, it said. "We have seen temperatures we were expecting in the middle of August being recorded in June and ... this is why it is considered a record year for temperatures in the Mediterranean Sea," Christos Spyrou, associate researcher at the Academy of Athens research centre for atmospheric physics, said. He said that the average sea temperatures in June were 3-6 degrees higher than the average between 1982-2023, which was used as a reference period. "We expected these sea temperatures in August," Spyrou said, adding specific temperatures were not yet available. "Some species will not be able to reproduce or survive in these conditions, especially in increasing temperatures.' Europe is the world's fastest-warming continent, heating up at twice the global average, according to Copernicus, making extreme heatwaves occur earlier in the year, and persist into later months. Several Italian regions banned outdoor work during the hottest hours of the day on Tuesday, France shut scores of schools and Spain confirmed last month as its hottest June on record as a severe heatwave gripped Europe, triggering widespread health alerts. A 69-year-old Greek resident who gave his name as Christos said he had noticed the warming waters off Athens. 'I have been coming here for 11 years, I believe the sea is a little warmer than other years. Every year it gets warmer, both in winter and in summer," he said REUTERS Find out more about climate change and how it could affect you on the ST microsite here.
Straits Times
27-06-2025
- Straits Times
The world is warming up - and it's happening faster
A report published last week found that human-caused global warming is now increasing by 0.27 degrees Celsius per decade. PHOTO: EPA-EFE NEW YORK - Summer started barely a week ago, and already the United States has been smothered in a record-breaking 'heat dome'. Alaska saw its first-ever heat advisory this month. And all of this comes on the heels of 2024, the hottest calendar year in recorded history. The world is getting hotter, faster. A report published last week found that human-caused global warming is now increasing by 0.27 degrees Celsius per decade. That rate was recorded at 0.2 degrees in the 1970s, and has been growing since. This doesn't surprise scientists who have been crunching the numbers. For years, measurements have followed predictions that the rate of warming in the atmosphere would speed up. But now, patterns that have been evident in charts and graphs are starting to become a bigger part of people's daily lives. 'Each additional fractional degree of warming brings about a relatively larger increase in atmospheric extremes, like extreme downpours and severe droughts and wildfires,' said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California. While this aligns with scientific predictions of how climate change can intensify such events, the increase in severity may feel sudden to people who experience them. 'Back when we had lesser levels of warming, that relationship was a little bit less dramatic,' Dr Swain said. 'There is growing evidence that the most extreme extremes probably will increase faster and to a greater extent than we used to think was the case,' he added. Take rainfall, for example. Generally, extreme rainfall is intensifying at a rate of 7 per cent with each degree Celsius of atmospheric warming. But recent studies indicate that so-called record-shattering events are increasing at double that rate, Dr Swain said. 'There is no weather that's happening outside of climate,' said Dr Kate Marvel, a climate scientist and author of the book 'Human Nature'. 'This is stuff that's manifesting in the real world,' she said, citing catastrophes such as Hurricane Helene that hit Florida in 2024. According to Dr Swain, scientists have yet to come to a universal understanding of these events, in part because the infrequent nature of outliers makes them difficult to study. And as warming has intensified, so have the impacts on vulnerable regions of the planet such as the Arctic and Antarctic, making previously rare or hidden consequences more apparent. Scientists are fine-tuning their models to understand the behaviour of the vast ice sheets in such places to match the rapid changes they're observing. In March 2025, a NASA analysis found that sea levels had risen faster than expected in 2024, in part because of a combination of melting glaciers and heat penetrating deeper into oceans, causing them to expand thermodynamically. Sea surface temperatures are rising faster than previously predicted, too, according to a study published in April by researchers at the National Center for Earth Observation in Britain. Cecilia Bitz, a professor of climate science at the University of Washington, said that modeling the Earth is complex, and that there are an innumerable amount of small factors that could be taken into account. But even with these uncertainties, scientists have ways of building their models to identify trends that are largely accurate. 'Nothing is defying our big picture about the physics of the climate system,' Prof Bitz said. Overall atmospheric warming has consistently followed modeling predictions for decades. But recently, the fundamental imbalance responsible for this heat has been tilting – catching even scientists off guard. Global warming is a symptom of Earth's energy imbalance, which is a measure of the difference between the total amount of heat reaching Earth from the sun, and the amount radiating back into space. In May 2025, a paper analysing data from a NASA satellite found that this imbalance had grown faster than expected, more than doubling in the past two decades and becoming nearly twice as large as it was previously predicted to be. Dr Zeke Hausfather, a research scientist at Berkeley Earth, said climate scientists were still working to understand these findings. There are various theories, such as fewer emissions of aerosols, a type of air pollution that is harmful to human health and that increases the reflectivity of clouds, which bounce the sun's heat back into space. Historically, aerosol emissions have masked the warming effect of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide. Over the past half-century or so, as nations reduced certain kinds of air pollution, aerosol emissions fell significantly. According to Dr Hausfather, this change is the primary reason atmospheric warming has accelerated in recent decades. But the most worrying possibility behind Earth's energy imbalance, he said, is how the general nature of clouds may be changing in response to climbing temperatures. It's a feedback loop that could potentially exacerbate warming and is 'one of the single biggest uncertainties in predicting future climate,' he said. As the world continues to emit planet-warming greenhouse gasses, and temperatures climb past what the human world was built to handle, Dr Marvel said, more people will experience climate change in damaging and frightening ways. 'It's always worse than expected when it happens to you,' Dr Marvel said. 'It is one thing to see something in a climate model, and it's a totally different thing to actually experience it in your own life.' NYTIMES Find out more about climate change and how it could affect you on the ST microsite here.
AsiaOne
27-06-2025
- AsiaOne
Rocks in Canada's Quebec province found to be the oldest on Earth, World News
Along the eastern shore of Hudson Bay in Canada's northeastern province of Quebec, near the Inuit municipality of Inukjuak, resides a belt of volcanic rock that displays a blend of dark and light green colours, with flecks of pink and black. New testing shows that these are Earth's oldest-known rocks. Two different testing methods found that rocks from an area called the Nuvvuagittuq Greenstone Belt in northern Quebec date to 4.16 billion years ago, a time known as the Hadean eon. The eon is named after the ancient Greek god of the underworld, Hades, owing to the hellish landscape thought to have existed then on Earth. The research indicates that the Nuvvuagittuq Greenstone Belt harbors surviving fragments of Earth's oldest crust, the planet's outermost solid shell. The Nuvvuagittuq rocks are mainly metamorphosed volcanic rocks of basaltic composition. Metamorphosed rock is a kind that has been changed by heat and pressure over time. Basalt is a common type of volcanic rock. The rocks tested in the new study were called intrusions. That means they formed when magma - molten rock - penetrated existing rock layers and then cooled and solidified underground. The researchers applied two dating methods based on an analysis of the radioactive decay of the elements samarium and neodymium contained in them. Both produced the same conclusion - that the rocks were 4.16 billion years old. Future chemical analyses of these rocks could provide insight into Earth's conditions during the Hadean, a time shrouded in mystery because of the paucity of physical remains. "These rocks and the Nuvvuagittuq belt being the only rock record from the Hadean, they offer a unique window into our planet's earliest time to better understand how the first crust formed on Earth and what were the geodynamic processes involved," said University of Ottawa geology professor Jonathan O'Neil, who led the study published on Thursday (June 26) in the journal Science. The rocks may have formed when rain fell on molten rock, cooling and solidifying it. That rain would have been composed of water evaporated from Earth's primordial seas. "Since some of these rocks were also formed from precipitation from the ancient seawater, they can shed light on the first oceans' composition, temperatures and help establish the environment where life could have begun on Earth," O'Neil said. Until now, the oldest-known rocks were ones dating to about 4.03 billion years ago from Canada's Northwest Territories, O'Neil said. While the Nuvvuagittuq samples are now the oldest-known rocks, tiny crystals of the mineral zircon from western Australia have been dated to 4.4 billion years old. The Hadean ran from Earth's formation roughly 4.5 billion years ago until 4.03 billion years ago. Early during this eon, a huge collision occurred that is believed to have resulted in the formation of the moon. But by the time the Nuvvuagittuq rocks formed, Earth had begun to become a more recognisable place. "The Earth was certainly not a big ball of molten lava during the entire Hadean eon, as its name would suggest. By nearly 4.4 billion years ago, a rocky crust already existed on Earth, likely mostly basaltic and covered with shallow and warmer oceans. An atmosphere was present, but different than the present-day atmosphere," O'Neil said. There had been some controversy over the age of Nuvvuagittuq rocks. As reported in a study published in 2008, previous tests on samples from the volcanic rock layers that contained the intrusions yielded conflicting dates - one giving an age of 4.3 billion years and another giving a younger age of 3.3 to 3.8 billion years. O'Neil said the discrepancy may have been because the method that produced the conclusion of a younger age was sensitive to thermal events that have occurred since the rock formed, skewing the finding. The new study, with two testing methods producing harmonious conclusions on the age of the intrusion rocks, provides a minimum age for the volcanic rocks that contain these intrusions, O'Neil added. "The intrusion would be 4.16 billion years old, and because the volcanic rocks must be older, their best age would be 4.3 billion years old, as supported by the 2008 study," O'Neil said. [[nid:706868]]
