Research reveal disturbing changes in waters surrounding Bermuda

Bermuda — a British island territory in the North Atlantic Ocean — has been experiencing some troubling changes. Researchers have revealed the exact reason.

Climate change is real and it has been leaving a massive impact on oceans and marine life. Global warming impacts ocean circulation, which means a decrease in oxygen levels, changes in nutrient supply and salinification, and ocean acidification. Now, scientists have observed troubling changes in the waters surrounding Bermuda.

After 40 years of monitoring, they found that the Atlantic Ocean around the archipelago is becoming warmer and losing oxygen. It is also growing increasingly salty and acidic.

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The water around Bermuda has been monitored since 1983. The researchers collect samples every month to study and examine all the details — the physics, chemistry, and biology — of the depths of the ocean, as well as the surface.

In the latest finding by the Bermuda Atlantic Time-series Study BATS) started at a site about 80 km southeast of the island of Bermuda.

It underlines how the water around the islands changed in the 2020s as compared to the 1980s and in a new paper published in Frontiers in Marine Science on December 8, researchers have presented the latest findings.

Author Prof Nicholas Bates, an ocean researcher at the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences, a unit of the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory at Arizona State University (ASU) and professor in the School of Ocean Futures at ASU, said: "We show that the surface ocean in the subtropical North Atlantic Ocean has warmed by around 1°C over the past 40 years. Furthermore, the salinity of the ocean has increased, and it has lost oxygen. In addition, ocean acidity has increased from the 1980s to the 2020s."

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Oxygen level also decreased

The ocean surface temperatures have increased by around 0.24°C each decade since the 1980s at the BATS monitoring station. The findings show that the ocean is around 1°C warmer now than it was 40 years ago.

The researchers also found that ocean temperatures haverisen more sharply in the last four years compared tothe previous decades. Not just warmer, the water has gotten more saline at the surface also.

"We suspect this is part of the broader, more recent trends and changes in ocean temperatures and environmental changes, like atmospheric warming and having had the warmest years globally," Bates said.

The data showed that the amount of oxygen available to living aquatic organisms has decreased by 6 per cent in over the last 40 years.

Bates explained: "The ocean chemistry of surface waters in the 2020s is now outside of the seasonal range observed in the 1980s and the ocean ecosystem now lives in a different chemical environment to that experienced a few decades ago. These changes are due to the uptake of anthropogenic CO2 from the atmosphere."