AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Diving into cool ocean water is one way to beat extreme heat. But like the atmosphere, the Earth's oceans are warming quickly. The global water surface temperature reached a record-breaking high last month, according to new data from Copernicus, the European Union's Earth observation agency. Brad deYoung is an oceanographer and professor at Memorial University in Canada. He joins me now from Vancouver. Good morning.
BRAD DEYOUNG: Good morning, and thanks for having me.
RASCOE: So how much hotter was the ocean last month compared to previous years?
DEYOUNG: Basically, this is the hottest it's ever been. The surface temperature has hit another new high, and it's now become at the point where we really expect, unfortunately, that the ocean and the atmosphere are going to keep breaking records like this because we keep heating the planet up. And what's perhaps surprising to some is that the ocean has more of this heat that's generated by our greenhouse gases than the atmosphere. So about 90% of the extra heating is in the ocean, not in the atmosphere.
RASCOE: But the actual difference - is it less than one degree?
DEYOUNG: So over the last century, the ocean temperature has increased about a degree Celsius. A degree doesn't sound like very much to people. They sort of say, oh, a degree. But this heat wave shows that that temperature change isn't just one degree. It's the extremes that occur that are built upon that that really have an impact. And so right now, the temperatures in the ocean in the tropical Pacific are about six degrees above normal.
RASCOE: Does having a hotter ocean have any effect on people?
DEYOUNG: Sure, it does. I mean, we live on planet ocean. We call it planet Earth, but it's more than two-thirds ocean. So things that happen in the ocean influence those of us on land for sure. El Nino, this super El Nino that we're experiencing right now, will have global impacts on agriculture around the planet. In southern United States, we expect more rainfall further north. We expect drier conditions. We would expect to see droughts in Australia. So when we get these big events in the ocean, the ocean warms up, it changes the whole atmosphere as well. And so that has weather impacts that last for not just a few days or weeks, but months or even years.
RASCOE: Do you have any examples of how it's affecting ecosystems?
DEYOUNG: Fish are moving towards the poles in all ocean basins, because the ocean water temperatures are becoming warmer for them everywhere in the ocean. We see fish moving their happy place towards the poles, and that will then have a whole food chain effect. And so people feel the changes in the ocean directly because of the warming that comes from the ocean water and the water vapor that comes off the ocean, but also through these ecosystem impacts which pass through little organisms, plant-like organisms through to fish and fisheries, and of course, humans eat a lot of fish.
RASCOE: Thinking about, you know, the five oceans - the Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, Arctic and Antarctic - are temperatures rising in some of the oceans, like, faster than the others?
DEYOUNG: On average, what we're seeing in all the ocean basins are increases in temperature. There's only one exception to that, and that is in the North Atlantic. We see a little kind of zone of cooling, which is tied to what we think is a large change in the ocean circulation pattern that may not be a happy story for us, but the impact of warming is generally higher at higher latitudes towards the poles than it is at the equator.
RASCOE: And President Trump recently sought to end ocean monitoring. Though his administration has backed down for now after pushback from Congress, what happens if that program is dismantled?
DEYOUNG: So the one program that they had threatened to cancel, the Ocean Observatory Initiative, they've now reneged on that for the moment, though it's not clear where it will end up. But many other ocean observation programs have been reduced or cut by this administration, and the research around it has also been reduced, and the monitoring that we need to know what's happening in the ocean is declining. If we don't do more science research to try to understand what is happening and how it's happening, we won't know what will come in the next 50 or a hundred years.
RASCOE: That's oceanographer and Professor Brad deYoung. Thank you so much for joining us.
DEYOUNG: Thank you, Ayesha, for this chance to remind everybody the ocean is out there. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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