02 October 2023 , 19:40
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As the ocean gets a bit greener, experts say it's an indication of change within the ecosystem on the ocean's floor.
Aquatic experts said that the record-high sea surface temperatures may not seem consequential, but it signals a danger to important marine life. Communities of Phytoplankton, which are microscopic photosynthesizing organism, are seminal to the aquatic food web and carbon cycle.
The carbon cycle "is the backbone of all life on Earth." Experts said the amount of carbon on earth has largely stayed the same. When new life is formed, carbon turns key molecules like protein and DNA.
The study was primarily focused on tropical and subtropical regions with the exception of higher latitudes (Getty Images)The shift in the water from a rich blue to green confirms a suspected trend that experts have predicted under climate change. These signal changes to the different ecosystems on the ocean's floor, which covers roughly 70 percent of Earth's surface.
Dr. B. B. Cael, a principal scientist at the United Kingdom's National Oceanography Centre, and his team uncovered that about 56 percent of the world's sea service has seen significant change in color within the last two decades, according to the National Ocean Service.
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Going off of ocean color analytics, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer(MODIS) instrument on NASA'S aqua satellite, Cael and her fellow researchers found a majority of the change stems from the ocean turning more green.
Researchers say there are several ecosystems down below the ocean floor (Getty Images)The study was primarily focused on tropical and subtropical regions with the exception of higher latitudes, which are dark for part of the year. "These are places we can detect a change in the ocean ecosystem in the last 20 years," Cael.
The map highlights the areas where ocean surface color changed between 2002 and 2022, with darker shades of green representing more-significant differences (higher signal-to-noise ratio). The black dots seen on the map indicates where chlorophyll levels have changed.
Chlorophyll has been the best measurement for remote sensing scientists to gauge phytoplankton abundance. However, those calculations only take a small subset of the visible light spectrum into account. The values in green better represent the ecosystem as a whole because they are based on the full spectrum of hues.
Chlorophyll is the go-to measurement for remote sensing scientists to gauge phytoplankton abundance (Getty Images)In the field of remote sensing, large time series from a single sensor are rather uncommon. Cael pondered what long-term trends would be found in the data as the Aqua satellite celebrated its 20th anniversary in orbit in 2022—far surpassing its intended lifespan of 6 years.
He was particularly interested in what might have been overlooked among the data it had gathered on ocean color. More information is encoded in the data than we really use, he claimed.