“Something strange is happening, and it is happening much faster than we thought .” These are the words of Anand Gnanadesikan, professor at Johns Hopkins University and co-author of a study that has been published in the journal Science .
It refers to the unexpected invasion of coccolithophores – a variety of unicellular algae – in the North Atlantic, since their presence has increased tenfold between 1965 and 2010. Although global warming could influence the birth boom of this microscopic algae, Scientists also believed that the acidification of the seas inherent to climate change should have slowed their proliferation . And just the opposite has happened, especially since the 1990s.
The large census of these beings is surely due to the increase in CO2 emissions, but scientists still do not know if good news or bad for the small fish and the zooplankton they serve as food . What it does reveal is the current ignorance of ocean ecosystems and their reaction to climate change. Perhaps its effects are even worse than previously believed.
William M. Balch, from the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in Maine and co-author of the paper, is not surprised by this phenomenon, since coccolithophores have become strong in other times of global warming and high levels of carbon dioxide. In the long term, these creatures play a fundamental role in the CO2 cycle, as they accumulate it in their characteristic calcium carbonate plates.
The data is based on the analysis of the Continuous Plankton Recorder , a study of British origin that is dedicated to measuring plankton levels in the oceans since the 1930s in the North Atlantic and North Sea.
