![]() ![]() ( Read about a die-off of baby dolphins in the Gulf.) Many others apparently have been sick ever since. But after a decade of close monitoring, Smith feels that she and colleagues have a clear picture of what is going on with that most gregarious of cetaceans, the bottlenose dolphin-and it’s grim.Ībout a thousand dolphins died in the months following the spill, after they ingested toxins from the oil. Many species have been difficult to study. federal and state governments-have enabled a legion of researchers to undertake long-term projects investigating how the spill affected Gulf wildlife. Funds from the Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act, the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative-and more recently, the $16 billion settlement between BP and the U.S. Smith is one of many scientists whose careers pivoted after this event. “Animals that weren’t born yet, those are the hope,” says Smith, a marine mammal expert who traveled to the spill. Unauthorized use is prohibited.Įven so, “based on our science to date, if you were a marine mammal alive in the Gulf at the time of the spill, it doesn’t look good for you,” says Cynthia Smith, a veterinarian at the National Marine Mammal Foundation. To see more, visit KUT 90.5.Please be respectful of copyright. Thanks for donating today.Ĭopyright 2023 KUT 90.5. Your gift helps pay for everything you find on and KUT.org. If you found the reporting above valuable, please consider making a donation to support it here. ![]() So we might see more intensified hurricanes in the future. So now that we have more heat starting in the ocean and ability to intensify hurricanes. One effect is intensified hurricanes, because hurricanes absorb heat from the ocean. So because the water becomes warmer and warmer, the distribution of some species started to move northward in the Gulf of Mexico.ĭo you have a sense of how this could affect Texas weather, as well? So some limited studies already found that the ecosystem has been affected by the warming in the Gulf of Mexico – such as the coral reef, bluefin tuna and some other species. So when the sea level rises, it can cause a lot of damage to the coastal communities, causing flooding to the wetlands on the coast and some other damages.ĭoes the warming affect the ecosystem, and to what extent? So one direct impact is a major causing of the sea level rise due to thermal expansion. Yeah, think about the consequence of the warming in the Gulf of Mexico. Well, so what are the implications for Texas? How is that going to affect fishing, recreation, and the many industries along the Gulf? And that increases the temperature, from what I understand you’re saying. So you have basically the flow of the water from the Caribbean Sea, if I understand it, entering an already warm body of water, which is the Gulf of Mexico. And because of the general tropical structure of the Gulf of Mexico, a lot of heat is starting to get inside it, causing the warming. The loop current and the loop current eddies actually direct a huge amount of heat from the Caribbean Sea into the Gulf of Mexico. Some parts of the ocean warm faster, and some parts warm slower. So the ocean is not uniformly warming at the same rate. You don’t sound terribly alarmed by this. I think a lot of people are alarmed to hear that the Gulf is warming at twice the rate of other large bodies of water around the earth. You say it’s still in the reasonable range? The Gulf of Mexico is just one of the areas that has a faster warming than the global ocean and twice the global rate is still in a reasonable range. Yeah, this sounds surprising, but that’s not a surprise to me because we already knew that the global ocean is warming and that the warming is not uniform. This finding that the Gulf of Mexico is warming at twice the rate of the rest of the oceans on Earth … are you surprised by that finding? So that’s about 70 years of serious data. So to quantify the warming region in the Gulf of Mexico, we analyzed more than 192,000 temperature profiles collected from the 1950s to 2020 in the Gulf of Mexico. Texas Standard: What were your findings, and how long of a period of history does this data cover? What was your methodology? This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity: Listen to the story above or read the transcript below. Zhankun Wang, an oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, joined the Standard to talk about the study and what it means for Texas coastal communities. And they’ve got the data to support that.īut a more immediate worry for Texans is the Gulf of Mexico, which scientists now say is warming at twice the speed of the rest of the oceans on earth. ![]() For decades, scientists have been saying that the polar ice caps are melting due to rising global temperatures.
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