nature

Warming Oceans Threaten Starfish

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According to Rebecca Vega Thurber, an associate professor of environmental microbiology at Oregon State University, who was not involved in the study, “What’s really exciting about this paper is the really strong correspondence between this temperature anomaly that occurred during that year when the sea stars started dying.”

Everywhere the warming went, the sunflower stars sickened and died.

The study showed a correlation between warming temperatures and the spread of the disease, not a direct cause. But it corroborates a hypothesis that was initially questioned because the virus that researchers think is responsible also shows up in healthy sea stars.

With Ocean Changes, So Will We

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There is a massive internal migration in the United States from the heartland to the coast. By mid-century, more than half the population will have moved to the edges, mostly into the density of large urban and suburban regions in search of work and social engagement. We will be running out of shoreline — assumed by wealthy estates, water-dependent and marine-related industries, vestigial public spaces like parks and beaches, and remnants of coastal wetlands that have been protected from the constant pressure of development.

Researchers Explains Coral Reef Bleaching

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We now have a 2017 event, which is not quite as bad as 2016, but certainly worse than the first two events that we studied [in 1998 and 2002]. That is significant because it postpones any hope of recovery. The current bleaching occupies a different geographical footprint from last year, which is bad news because it means between last year and this year a much greater extent of the Great Barrier Reef has now been damaged. In 2017, the hot water was in the middle of the Great Barrier Reef, the central section; last year it was in the north.

New Study On Arctic Ice Melt

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Arctic sea ice has been rapidly declining since satellites first started tracking it in 1979, and according to NASA, roughly 13.3 percent of the ice disappears every decade. Models have projected that manmade global warming would heat the Arctic faster than it would heat more temperate regions, and observation has borne that out. The Arctic is warming at least twice as fast as the rest of the globe, and the first two months of this year both had the lowest levels of sea ice on historical record.