Heat waves don’t just strike on land — they can also occur in the ocean. And roughly a third of marine heat waves aren’t detectable at the ocean’s surface, a new study reports. The findings, published in the December Nature Geoscience, suggest that far more of these potentially harmful events might be occurring than previously believed.
Ocean heat waves can have a slew of adverse effects on marine ecosystems because many forms of life cannot rapidly adapt to changes in temperature. For instance, cod populations were devastated from 2013 to 2015 when a marine heat wave lingered off the West Coast of North America. Given the interconnectedness of marine
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