A new study suggests the world’s oxygen depleted seas may have a chance of returning to higher oxygen concentrations in the centuries to come, despite our increasingly warming climate.
A new study suggests the world’s oxygen depleted seas may have a chance of returning to higher oxygen concentrations in the centuries to come, despite our increasingly warming climate.
Researchers at the University of Southampton (UK) and Rutgers University (USA) examined fossilised plankton from the Arabian Sea and found that despite dramatic global warming 16 million years ago, oxygen levels were higher than today. The sea only became truly oxygen deficient four million years later, as the climate cooled.
In addition, the team revealed the region, off the west coast of India, behaved differently than a similar low-oxygen area in the Pacific, suggesting other local systems, such as strong winds, ocean currents, and outflow from marginal seas may have delayed the process.
The scientists’ findings are published in the Nature journal Communications Earth & Environment.
Read More: University of Southampton
Photo Credit: Alexandra Auderset and colleague Alfredo Martinez-Garcia in a lab at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry. Credit: Simone Moretti
