New research suggests that our ancient oceans were more resilient to climate changes than our current ocean waters. Researchers looked at a sample of oxygen levels in ancient ocean waters to learn that the oxygen was more absent back in those days from the sea floor.
Both past and present global warming plays a significant role in the decrease in oxygen but there’s an increase in global warming now that our ancient oceans didn’t experience. The increased global warming is happening at a faster rate than it did in ancient times.
The good news that scientists feel is worth sharing is that our ocean floor was extremely resilient to global warming 56 million years ago and so it should do just fine to survive what our current rate of global warming throws at it. At least, that’s their optimistic thought about it.
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Things Are Different
Some factors play a significant role in why our ancient oceans were more resilient to climate change overall. Human activity causes more nutrients to go into the ocean waters of today. This happens from fertilizers and pollution.
It’s predicted that we will see no more than a 2% change in oxygen depletion when compared to ancient oceans, but it still causes concern with scientists. Our ancient oceans didn’t have to complete with human-caused global warming.
You see, human beings accelerate the rate at which our planet warms which wasn’t relevant 56 million years ago. With all of the changes in our planet from more human life to more animal life, vehicles, manufacturing plants, and other industrial revolution changes it seems that global warming is occurring faster than our ancient oceans had to cope with.
Why are oceans different?
Some ocean water is cooler or has more salinity than other ocean waters. This is partially due to where each ocean is located. While each of the oceans eventually join together to create one massive ocean, the southern ocean waters tend to help cool the Earth.
Southern oceans are considered to be oceanographically separate from the other oceans, but geographically speaking you could look at the oceans and feel they’re connected. The region each ocean is in and where it lies in relation to the equator play a significant role in the differences of each ocean.
While we can look to our past to make estimates on how our ocean temperature may change, it’s merely an estimate and without knowing for sure how human beings can impact the depletion of oxygen on the ocean floor, scientists are just doing their best to make accurate models to predict the future.