LONDON: According to data released on Thursday by the EU's Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), ocean temperatures reached a record high in February, with the average worldwide sea surface temperature being 21.06 degrees Celsius.
In a dataset spanning back to 1979, the average sea surface temperature in February exceeded the previous high of 20.98 C, which was achieved in August 2023.
Arriving during the hottest February on record, the alarming marine record was the ninth straight month to reach this milestone for that particular month.
This week, marine experts issued a warning, claiming that the fourth worldwide mass coral bleaching catastrophe in recorded Earth history is most likely occurring in the Southern Hemisphere due to rising waters.
Under severe stress, corals bleach, driving out the beneficial, colourful algae that reside in their tissues and leaving behind a pale skeleton. They become susceptible to hunger and illness as a result, and many of them perish.
Fragile reef ecosystems may collapse as a result, leaving coasts vulnerable to erosion, storms, and overfishing.The extra heat is being produced by both human-caused climate change and an El Nino climate pattern, which is borne out of warmer-than-normal surface waters in the Eastern Pacific.
Climate scientist Richard Allan of the University of Reading stated, "What is more surprising is that sea surface temperatures are at record levels over regions far away from the centre of the El Nino action, such as the tropical Atlantic and Indian Ocean."
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