Unchecked Global Emissions on Track to Initiate Mass Extinction of Marine Life
hubie writes:
From a story out of Princeton University:
As greenhouse gas emissions continue to warm the world's oceans, marine biodiversity could be on track to plummet within the next few centuries to levels not seen since the extinction of the dinosaurs, according to a recent study in the journal Science by Princeton University researchers.
The paper's authors modeled future marine biodiversity under different projected climate scenarios. They found that if emissions are not curbed, species losses from warming and oxygen depletion alone could come to mirror the substantial impact humans already have on marine biodiversity by around 2100. Tropical waters would experience the greatest loss of biodiversity, while polar species are at the highest risk of extinction, the authors reported.
[...] "The silver lining is that the future isn't written in stone," said first author Justin Penn, a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Geosciences. "The extinction magnitude that we found depends strongly on how much carbon dioxide [CO2] we emit moving forward. There's still enough time to change the trajectory of CO2 emissions and prevent the magnitude of warming that would cause this mass extinction."
[...] The researchers report that the pattern of extinction their model projected - with a greater global extinction of species at the poles compared to the tropics - mirrors the pattern of past mass extinctions.
[...] The model also helps resolve an ongoing puzzle in the geographic pattern of marine biodiversity. Marine biodiversity increases steadily from the poles towards the tropics, but drops off at the equator. This equatorial dip has long been a mystery; researchers have been unsure about what causes it and some have even wondered whether it is real. Deutsch and Penn's model provides a plausible explanation for the drop in equatorial marine biodiversity: the oxygen supply is too low in these warm waters for some species to tolerate.
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.