hidden was solved when it was found that it was being trapped deep in world’s oceans. While this had granted us a minor reprieve in the otherwise measurable increase in the atmosphere’s temperature, a new study has shown to what extent the ocean’s heat-absorbing ability has been helping us.
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This is not a morality tale about planetary preservation – and what happens if you don’t take good care of your literal ground of being. But after years of assuming that Mars is and always had been inhospitable to life, scientists at NASA are now convinced that an ocean once covered 20% of the surface of Mars. In some places, the ocean was likely a mile in depth. And according to Charles Cockell, a professor of astrobiology at Edinburgh University, “The longer water persists on a planetary body in one location, particularly if there is geological turnover, the more likely it is that it would provide a habitable environment for a suitable duration for life to either originate or proliferate. An ocean would meet this need.”
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Climate change is already upon us, experts say, and we are already feeling its adverse effects in the form of extreme weather events: scorching temperatures leading to droughts, torrential rains causing widespread flooding, and record freezes bringing feet of snow.
But what of the less obvious effects of global warming?
It seems that climate change is impacting life across the whole planet in the most unexpected ways: a new study suggests that the increasing acidification of ocean waters caused by rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels could rob sharks of their ability to sense the smell of food.
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Changes in coastal ocean temperatures have been much more extreme over the past 10 years than expected. This could especially affect California, which is a major breadbasket for the rest of the United States.
Researchers have also found that temperature determines where key soil microbes can thrive– microbes that are critical to forming topsoil crusts in arid lands. Scientists predict that in as little as 50 years, global warming may push some of these microbes out of their present stronghold in US deserts, with unknown consequences to soil fertility and erosion.
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