Warming Of The Ocean

Have you ever thought of what the consequences of global warming on the earth would be? Pretty drastic if you ask me. Not many people think about the ocean as being subjected to global warming since it is such a big body of water, nothing really happens, right? Wrong. The ocean is a place where there is so much diversity, life and wonder and when things change too much, there can be trouble down below. Especially when the planet starts to warm up. For the past decades, the Earth has been slowly increasing in temperature and absorbing about 80% of the Earth’s heat due to climate change. There are many problems with this change that people may think is insignificant because our ocean is so big, but is really one of the most important parts on the planet. 

One of the main problems is coral bleaching. This occurs when the ocean temperature rises. The coral, who have small invertebrates living in them called zooxanthellae who live symbiotically in the coral tissues assisting with the collection of nutrients through their photosynthesis. When the temperature increases just one or two degrees for just five to ten weeks, this induces the corals to bleach and if the conditions stay like this for long periods of time, or get worse, the corals won’t have enough time to recover damaging them forever. The result of this is fish will die, or have to migrate elsewhere depleting the population of the organisms who populate a coral reef, and less animal diversity. Save the coral reefs and pollute less so global warming isn’t such a big effect on the life on our planet.

On the left is a healthy coral and on the right is a bleached coral

References
Climate change signals
Conservation.org
Coral Bleaching