The Downsides of Ocean Warming

Like trees, the ocean can also play a vital role in carbon and heat sequestration. The plant life that thrives within it can absorb carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere the same way forest trees and coastal mangroves do, while the ocean itself regulates the absorbed heat by dispersing it to other parts of the world via currents — though not eliminating it completely. But like everything else, even the ocean has a certain limit as to how much heat it can absorb. We don’t need to wait around and see what that threshold is, as we’re already seeing some implications caused by the ever-warming oceans.

Perhaps the most telling effects of ocean warming are the changes within its ecosystem, one of which being the erratic migration patterns of its inhabitants. According to the US-based National Environmental Education Foundation (NEEF), “more than 80% of earth’s marine life is migrating to different places and changing their breeding and feeding patterns due to warming waters”. If a certain environment reaches a temperature that becomes too unsuitable for its dwellers, or if such changes cause the environment to yield fewer necessities (such as food) for said inhabitants, they would go out of their usual migratory patterns to travel to regions they don’t tend to go to in search of those essentials.