According to a recent new study, the oxygen levels in the oceans have dropped significantly over the past half a century owing to our own human activities such as the use of fossil fuels and dumping of fertilizers in the sea.
Researchers from the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Germany, studied five decades worth of data in the most in-depth assessment of ocean oxygen levels ever done and discovered that the amount of oxygen in the worlds oceans has decreased by 2 percent.
They describe the drop as non-critical so far, but warn that it could have a devastating effect on marine life as they rely on oxygen for their survival.
Oceanographer, Lothar Stramma explains, "While the slight decrease of oxygen in the atmosphere is currently considered non-critical, the oxygen losses in the ocean can have far-reaching consequences because of the uneven distribution. For fisheries and coastal economies this process may have detrimental consequences."
As the temperatures across the world rise, it jump starts a chemical reaction under the sea resulting in warmer water; which is then less efficient at trapping gasses such as oxygen and they escape up into the atmosphere.
As warmer water is also lighter and less dense, it expands more so less amounts of oxygen make its way down to the lower depths of the ocean.
The biggest drop was in the North and Equatorial Pacific oceans, which alone accounted for nearly 40 percent of the overall 2 percent slide.
As the phenomenon continues, more regions of the ocean are likely to become uninhabitable, the researchers predict. All of this is bad news for anything that exists under the sea, and our planet's delicately balanced ecosystem.
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