Decades of Data on Worlds Oceans Reveal a Troubling Oxygen Decline
http://www.rh.gatech.edu/news/591290/decades-data-worlds-oceans-reveal-troubling-oxygen-decline[font face=Serif][font size=5]Decades of Data on Worlds Oceans Reveal a Troubling Oxygen Decline[/font]
Posted May 3, 2017
[font size=3]A new analysis of decades of data on oceans across the globe has revealed that the amount of dissolved oxygen contained in the water an important measure of ocean health has been declining for more than 20 years.
Researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology looked at a historic dataset of ocean information stretching back more than 50 years and searched for long term trends and patterns. They found that oxygen levels started dropping in the 1980s as ocean temperatures began to climb.
The oxygen in oceans has dynamic properties, and its concentration can change with natural climate variability, said Taka Ito, an associate professor in Georgia Techs School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences who led the research. The important aspect of our result is that the rate of global oxygen loss appears to be exceeding the level of nature's random variability.
The study, which was published April in
Geophysical Research Letters, was sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The team included researchers from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the University of Washington-Seattle, and Hokkaido University in Japan.
[/font][/font]
http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/2017GL073613