About 84% of coral reefs suffer from a lack of oxygen. This was reported by TASS with reference to the University of California at San Diego.
Corals are extremely sensitive to the state of the environment, so a sharp global warming threatens their existence. Especially due to fluctuations in the acidity of the water, polyps may lose their ability to form a calcareous crust. Coral reefs are a hotbed of biodiversity and home to many living things, and thus the reduction of their area is causing major damage to the Earth’s biosphere.
Andreas Andersson and his colleagues conducted a study and found that due to global warming, corals suffer not only from high temperatures and high acidity, but also from oxygen starvation. This conclusion was made during the study of 32 great reefs of the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, including off the coasts of Australia, Hawaii, Panama and Okinawa.
The authors of the study conducted several expeditions to these coral reefs and placed several autonomous sensors in their areas that collect data about water temperature, salinity, acidity, and oxygen concentration every half hour. This information, the researchers note, is critical for assessing how global warming and related processes affect the survival of coral polyps.
Subsequent analysis of the data collected by these sensors unexpectedly showed that almost all of the coral reefs studied, more than 84% of them, suffered from persistent hypoxia, moderate oxygen starvation. Another 13% of the corals experienced occasional severe hypoxia, during which the oxygen concentration in the waters surrounding the polyps fell below two milligrams per liter.
These problems are especially evident at night and in the early morning, when the algae do not produce oxygen, but absorb it, in the absence of the sun. In the future, the problem may worsen as the water warms (and its ability to dissolve oxygen decreases).
ancient biologists perceivedthat global warming is causing an increase in the size of plant flowers.
Source: Gazeta
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