Climate change has become an increasingly common topic of discussion over the recent years. It is taking toll of our environment and surrounding particularly the ocean ecosystem. The ocean ecosystems continue to be the epicenter of global warming. The ever-warming temperatures affect oceans triggering various changes in the biogeochemistry of the ocean, which in turn affect the functioning of a society ( Boyd et al., 2014).
The changes generated by global warming to the world’s oceans include coral bleaching. According to Boyd et al (2014), the events of mass coral bleaching observed in the recent years are facilitated by the warm temperatures attributed to climate change. This has resulted in death of many coral reefs that leads to starvation of many species that depend on coral reefs for food.
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Additionally, ocean warming makes the environment for fish hostile thus in response, they migrate towards the poles, which in turn disturb the fisheries across the globe. Moreover, global warming has caused acceleration of sea levels to rise, which facilitates drowning of wetlands, because they cannot keep their blades above water any more ( Poloczanska et al., 2014).
Furthermore, global warming causes ocean acidification. Today, carbon dioxide totaling to around 22 million tons is absorbed by the ocean per day. This leads to a significant increase in ocean acidity by about 25 percent. Increased acidity has damaging effects to thousands of ocean species especially those that utilize calcium carbonate to form shells and skeletons. Evidence reveals that higher acidity disrupts formation of calcium acidification. Ocean acidification seems to be influencing the entire ecosystems like coral reefs that depend on calcium carbonate formation to form reef structure. The reef structure serves as home to reef organisms thus crucial (Pecl et al., 2017).
The changes in our oceans should be a concern to us because oceans are at the brink of disruption. These changes have grave implications not only to the ocean ecosystems, killing fish and sea species with toxins, but also has devastating effects on humans too. Therefore, global warming has damaging consequences to the entire world.
References
Boyd, P. W., Lennartz, S. T., Glover, D. M., & Doney, S. C. (2015). Biological ramifications of climate-change-mediated oceanic multi-stressors. Nature Climate Change , 5 (1), 71.
Pecl, G. T., Araújo, M. B., Bell, J. D., Blanchard, J., Bonebrake, T. C., Chen, I. C., ... & Falconi, L. (2017). Biodiversity redistribution under climate change: Impacts on ecosystems and human well-being. Science , 355 (6332), eaai9214.
Poloczanska, E. S., Burrows, M. T., Brown, C. J., García Molinos, J., Halpern, B. S., Hoegh-Guldberg, O., ... & Sydeman, W. J. (2016). Responses of marine organisms to climate change across oceans. Frontiers in Marine Science , 3 , 62.
