A fever is rising in the ocean.
Our rampant burning of fossil fuels has produced a heat-trapping
blanket of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere that has warmed the Earth. But the situation
would be much worse without the ocean, which has absorbed more than 90 percent of that excess
heat.
Scientists reported that in 2020, the ocean held the most heat ever recorded. In recent decades
(1987-2019), ocean warming has increased by 450 percent, compared to the three decades before
that (1955-1986). Last year, the ocean absorbed more than 200 times as much heat as it did on
average in the years between 1981 and 2010. That extra heat has dramatic impacts.
Warmer waters are turbocharging the planet’s water cycle. More moisture is evaporating into the
atmosphere—powering stronger, wetter, and longer-lasting storms and cyclones. At the same time,
historically arid regions are getting even less rainfall and more droughts and wildfires.
As ocean waters warm, they expand in volume. They also hasten the melting of Antarctic and
Greenland ice sheets, returning hundreds of gigatons of water previously frozen on land back into
the ocean. This combination is raising sea levels at an accelerating pace. Sea levels are estimated
to be at least 0.3 meters (1 foot) higher by 2100, perhaps 2.5 meters (8.2 feet) if we don’t curtail
greenhouse gas emissions, threatening to inundate wetlands, buildings, and roads.
Warming waters are also affecting the habitats, food sources, metabolisms, and behavior of marine
life throughout the food web, from plankton to whales, in interconnected ways that are hard to
unravel but increasingly apparent. Some changes are already occurring, among which are more
frequent harmful algal blooms and coral bleaching.
“It’s easy to get bombarded with negative projections,” said Dr. Jamison Gove, a National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scientist who studies Hawaiian corals. “But I’m generally
optimistic.”
Amid dire change, he sees nature’s inherent ability to adapt. “I’m realistic that ecosystems are
changing and will be different than today, but coral reefs have a solid chance to persist—assuming
we keep learning from our research, and society takes the necessary steps to conserve and
manage.”
“Look at Hanauma Bay,” said Dr. Angelicque White, a microbial oceanographer at the University of
Hawai‘i at Mānoa (UHM). “During the COVID-19 lockdown, free of thousands of tourists and
sunscreen pollution, marine life bloomed again. These ecosystems are resilient.”
The pandemic crisis offers another lesson, she said. “We couldn’t close our eyes and wish it would
go away.” Instead, we needed solid research to devise the best strategies to adapt. The same is true
for our climate crisis.
What’s the weather forecast?
The surest long-term way to avoid the worst impacts of climate change is to reduce CO2 emissions.
In the short term, we’ll have to adapt, said Dr. Malte Stuecker, an assistant professor in the
Department of Oceanography and the International Pacific Research Center at UHM.
Stuecker reverse-engineers the complicated cogs in the machinery that produces our climate. His
models are dynamic blueprints of ocean-atmosphere interactions, such as the El Niño/Southern
Oscillation (ENSO), which seesaws over time and regulates globe-spanning rainfall patterns.
ENSO’s delicately balanced components include variations in trade winds that redirect masses of
sun-heated water. Evaporation over these moving warm pools in these trade-wind regions drives
water vapor into the atmosphere. That provides the fuel for clouds and moisture-laden storm
systems that ripple out in varying far-flung directions, redirecting rainfall to different regions at
different times.
Climate modelers have made enormous strides in understanding how the air-sea system operates.
With enhanced computing power and more ocean-monitoring instruments feeding in more data,
Stuecker and colleagues continually fine-tune their models to provide more accurate and detailed
predictions of what will unfold—six months from now and decades into the future—as ocean
warming revs up.
Until we can shrink our collective carbon footprint, we won’t be able to prevent extreme storms,
floods, and droughts. But we can shore up infrastructure, revise farming practices, ensure water
supplies, and take other steps to reduce the damage from them. The key, Stuecker said, is having
more precise forecasts.
An ominously rising tide
Along with fiercer storms, add more water, and you have a recipe for more flooding. Higher sea
levels supply more
water that storms can push inland. Rising seas also push island water tables higher, which can
combine with heavy rainfalls to cause inland flooding.
“People have seen firsthand the impacts of Hurricane Katrina, Superstorm Sandy, and increasing
‘sunny-day’ flooding in Florida,” said Dr. Karen Thorne, a scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey in
Davis, California. “More people are no longer in denial about sea-level rise or think it’s a problem for
the next generation to solve.”
In 2017, Hawai‘i Sea Grant published a Sea Level Rise Vulnerability and Adaptation Report, which
projects that a 1 meter (3.2-foot) sea-level rise would render more than 25,800 acres of state land
unusable, and compromise more than 6,500 structures. The publication includes the Hawai‘i Sea
Level Rise Viewer, an interactive atlas that people can use to pinpoint their location’s vulnerability.
The report also outlines plans to prevent flooding where possible, along with a “managed retreat”
policy to identify inland areas to develop.
Ideas once considered too complicated and costly are now being discussed around the world,
including massive dike and canal systems to block or distribute floodwaters. Or using dredged
sediments in innovative ways: to build up sand dunes as bulwarks, construct large offshore
sandbars to block incoming waves, or even re-create new land areas for islands at risk of being
drowned. Thorne heads an ongoing experiment to spray dredged sediments atop a subsiding marsh
in Anaheim, California, and elevate it by 10 inches.
Green infrastructure
In other places, scientists are exploring “a green infrastructure approach,” Thorne said, “letting
nature work better on our behalf to protect shorelines by protecting wetlands or planting and
fertilizing vegetation to help elevate and stabilize them.”
Thorne, for example, led a study to examine whether protective coastal mangrove forests on
Micronesian islands can withstand fast-rising seas.
Though they are invasive in Hawai‘i, in many parts of the world mangroves can be nature’s ideal
coastal ramparts. They thrive in areas flushed tidally with salt water, pumping oxygen down to
intricate, rapidly growing root systems submerged in mud and extending above the sea surface,
said Dr. Richard MacKenzie, a research ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service based in Hilo, Hawai‘i.
Sediments suspended in tides hit the roots, settle down, and build up the seafloor, often allowing
the mangroves to keep pace with sea-level rise. The root systems also buffer storm waves,
protecting coastlines from erosion.
MacKenzie has worked extensively with colleagues in the Forest Service and Western Pacific island
nations to educate communities about mangrove forests’ value, suggest ways to prevent their
destruction, except in Hawai‘i, investigate where and why mangrove forests aren’t doing well, and
devise solutions.
To enhance ways to monitor mangroves, MacKenzie recently spearheaded the invention of a
ground-based LIDAR (light detection and ranging) system that emits tens of thousands of laser
pulses to scan an entire mangrove forest in seconds, collecting detailed data on how trees are
growing.
“It’s like using Star Wars technology in the Dagobah Swamp,” he said.
A bird’s-eye view of corals
Breakthrough technology offers hope for other species. In December, scientists announced that
they had flown an innovative airborne laboratory above all the coral reefs around eight Hawaiian
islands and created unprecedented comprehensive maps that chart the corals’ health.
Corals normally house symbiotic photosynthesizing algae that provide food to the corals in
exchange for shelter. But when waters become too warm, the colorful algae depart, leaving corals
starved for food and showing naked, white skeletons—a phenomenon called coral bleaching. At the
same time, corals are being stressed by human activities: overfishing, tourism, and pollution.
Using the airborne lab, these scientists can gather data efficiently and repeatedly over wide swaths
of ecosystems that are difficult for humans to access. The lab was developed over decades by Dr.
Greg Asner and colleagues at Arizona State University’s Center for Global Discovery and
Conservation Science (CDCS) in Hilo. The lab is equipped with LIDAR, cameras, and two high-
resolution spectrometers that measure hundreds of wavelengths of light across the spectrum from
ultraviolet to infrared. The spectrometers detect light emitted by chemicals in organisms, Asner
said, and live and dead corals have fundamentally different chemical signatures.
GDCS scientists employed artificial intelligence techniques to interpret collected data and
distinguish corals from rocks, waves, and clouds. They then teamed with Gove and other marine
biologists, who superimposed their data on waves, water temperatures, fishing, shoreline
development, and pollution.
“This is a tremendous leap forward,” Gove said. “Now we can really paint a picture of where and why
corals persist or not. We can home in on what traits or conditions allow them to survive despite
threats. We can parse our different impacts from climate change versus human activities and
determine which factors we need to mitigate to give reefs their best chance of persisting.”
Fish, whales, and walruses
At least corals are stationary. It’s even harder to determine how ocean warming is affecting animals
that move around in the vast ocean.
Coral reef fish may lose habitat. Other species may shift their ranges, moving to cooler waters if
they can’t tolerate heat or following the migrations of preferred prey, said Dr. Eva Schemmel, a
research scientist at NOAA Pacific Islands Science Center.
Warmer temperatures also increase fishes’ metabolic rates, so they grow faster and reach sexual
maturity when they are younger. Some species—moi (Pacific threadfin) and ‘ama’ama (striped
mullet), for example—have shifted or extended their spawning, and regulations to temporarily close
fisheries to protect spawning haven’t kept up.
“Paying attention to shifts that occur as environmental conditions change and adapting harvesting
practices is one way to help ensure that fisheries remain sustainable,” said Schemmel, who has
worked with community fishers.
Tracking larger ocean life, Dr. Sue Moore of the University of Washington is seeing “boom times for
some baleen whales,” but challenging times for other marine mammals in the Arctic. Warmer ocean
waters circulating northward are accelerating the melting of sea ice. The summer extent of Arctic
Ocean ice has diminished from an average of 2.64 million square miles in the 1980s to 1.44 million
in 2020.
For polar bears, walruses, and seals that depend on sea ice platforms to hunt, rest, and rear young,
disappearing ice is daunting. But it also opens new expanses of ocean in which plankton can
flourish, producing a bountiful buffet for baleen whales.
“We’re routinely seeing more temperate whale species—humpbacks, minke, and fins—joining
seasonally migrating gray whales and endemic bowheads coming into the Arctic to feed in summer
and early autumn,” Moore said.
Warming waters could also cause ecosystem changes elsewhere that are detrimental to whales.
And an open Arctic Ocean also means more commercial and military ship traffic and noise that
threaten whales. To cohabit, Moore says, “we have the capacity to add ocean monitoring systems
and coordinate with reports from Indigenous communities to better predict regional ocean
conditions. For example, if we know where krill are swarming, we know whales will likely be there
and can inform ocean users to reduce ship speed and refrain from approaching animals.”
Tiny critters and mammoth geoengineering
How will a warming ocean affect life at the bottom of the food chain? That’s a challenging question
for scientists. The adaptive capacities of innumerable species of plankton remain mysterious, and
the factors besetting them are myriad, said White, the UHM marine microbiologist.
But could plankton and the ocean help solve our problem? At the sea surface, photosynthetic
plankton convert carbon dioxide (CO2) into organic carbon. When they die and decompose, a
portion sinks, carrying carbon to the depths. This “biological pump” effectively extracts excess CO2
from the atmosphere and sequesters it in the deep ocean.
White is a member of a National Academy of Sciences committee convened last fall to assess the
feasibility and risks of ambitious geoengineering strategies to ramp up ocean CO2 removal and
sequestration. Strategies include adding alkaline minerals to seawater to increase CO2 solubility
and developing new technologies to extract CO2 from seawater and transport and store it deep in
the ocean.
The committee is also investigating ways to speed up the biological pump. Among these are “blue
carbon” projects such as protecting and restoring mangrove forests, whose root systems capture
and store five to ten times as much carbon as land forests, MacKenzie said; injecting iron and other
nutrients into the ocean or devising systems to drive nutrient-rich deep water to the surface to
fertilize more phytoplankton growth; and cultivating and harvesting more CO2-extracting algae and
seaweed.
“We need a portfolio of solutions and global cooperation,” White said. “Another lesson of the
pandemic slowdown is that our carbon dioxide emissions are projected to drop by seven percent in
2020. We see that coordinated actions of humanity can greatly reduce emissions. We shouldn’t feel
overwhelmed, because there is still time to take action to protect our environment for generations
to come.”