No good news for oceans (part 2): synonyms
Click on words or phrases in the article that are similar in meaning to these:
- almost without exception
- together with
- similar
- escape (verb)
- extreme (adjective)
- a little
- resemble
- vulnerable
- toughness
- report (noun)
Their model predicted changes in temperature, oxygen levels, increased acidity and productivity (the creation of organic compounds by primary producers like phytoplankton) on both the ocean surface and the sea floor under those two future scenarios. Nearly across the board on the ocean’s surface, they found, their models predicted a continued warming and rise in acidity accompanied by a decline in oxygen and productivity. The only exception was in a small fraction of the sea in polar regions, where the sea surface would experience increased oxygen and productivity. The magnitude of these predicted changes, they write, will be greater than any comparable shifts over the past 20 million years.
“When you look at the world ocean, there are few places that will be free of changes; most will suffer the simultaneous effects of warming, acidification, and reductions in oxygen and productivity,” Camilo Mora, a geographer at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, said in a press release.
The most drastic impacts, they found, will occur on the ocean’s surface, but the sea floor will also experience its share of smaller but still significant changes. Sea floor temperature and acidity will change only slightly compared to the surface, but there will be large reductions in the influx of carbon, which provides food for many bottom-dwelling organisms. The drop in dissolved oxygen on the sea floor will be similar to that experienced on the surface.
These changes may be enough to disrupt the ocean floor’s delicate ecosystem. ”Because many deep-sea ecosystems are so stable, even small changes in temperature, oxygen, and acidity may lower the resilience of deep-sea communities,” Lisa Levin, an oceanographer at the University of California, San Diego, and co-author of the paper, said in the release. “This is a growing concern as humans extract more resources and create more disturbances in the deep ocean.”