The world's oceans are headed for a huge shakeup in the next 100 years, according to a new study.
According to a new study by a team of 29 international scientists based at the University of Hawaii, Honolulu, every cubic inch of every ocean in the world is going to undergo changes at fundamental levels in the next century. That's the entire world's ocean surface and everything beneath, changing habitats and upending complex systems throughout the world.
Climate change is the cause, according to the scientists' report, published in the journal PLOS Biology, of the oncoming changes to the oceans on a chemical level.
"Climate change caused by human activity could damage biological and social systems," said the authors' summary. "Here we gathered climate, biological, and socioeconomic data to describe some of the events by which ocean biogeochemical changes triggered by ongoing greenhouse gas emissions could cascade through marine habitats and organisms, eventually influencing humans."
"Our results suggest that the entire world's ocean surface will be simultaneously impacted by varying intensities of ocean warming, acidification, oxygen depletion, or shortfalls in productivity."
Throughout most of the world's oceans, the seawater will continue to warm, while the pH balance - the level of acidification found in water, which is vital to life from microorganism all the way up to the largest whales - will continue to lower.
The changes will lead to a cascade of chain-reaction consequences: plankton production will decline, along with oxygen levels in most of the world's oceans. That will lead to a reduction in the development and size of small ocean life, and an increase in the probability that those creatures will die early. Obviously, an effect on the base of the food chain will cause harm all the way up, and larger creatures will have a harder time finding food.
The shift in pH, oxygen levels, and temperature and will affect shallow water environments as well. Ecosystems like coral reefs are going to experience drastic changes, especially those in the tropics.
As for polar regions, they're not exempt from the massive changes coming to the world's oceans, but the affects will be different. They're expected to experience an increase in oxygen and productivity, leading to the possibility of invasive species migrating to these cooler waters to survive.
Unsurprisingly, warming oceans will also cause trouble for humans, with tourism and fishing impacted first. The study notes that the poorest of the human population in developing coastal countries are expected to reap most of the negative impacts at first, saying "470 to 870 million of the world's poorest people rely on the ocean for food, jobs and revenues, and live in countries where ocean goods and services could be compromised by multiple ocean biogeochemical changes."
The researchers used data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, along with biological and socioeconomic data to develop their projections, compiling more than 80,000 maps of oceanic change to run two different climate change scenarios: one in which humans cut back on CO2 production and another where it's "business as usual."
As you might expect, the "business as usual" scenario resulted in the worst changes to oceans and humans, with almost a billion ocean-dependent people facing the most difficult socioeconomic conditions, but even under the less drastic scenario, over half a billion humans will face the consequences of climate change by the end of the century.