Climate Change Drastically Impacts Seafloor Marine Life by 2100

Climate change is impacting the globe. Now, scientists have found that not even deep-sea marine life is safe. They've discovered that seafloor marine life will decline by up to 38 percent in the North Atlantic and over five percent globally over the next century.

In order to learn a bit more about climate change and how it might impact the ocean, the scientists used climate models in order to predict changes in food supply throughout the world oceans. The researchers then applied a relationship between food supply and biomass calculated from a huge global database of marine life.

So what did they find? It turns out that changes were occurring in communities living on average four kilometers under the surface of the ocean. Because these ecosystems rely on the remains of surface ocean marine life that drift downward, the health of surface waters can greatly impact deep ocean waters. Nutrient supplies are likely to suffer because of climate impacts, such as the slowing of global ocean circulation.

"There has been some speculation about climate change impacts on the seafloor, but we wanted to try and make numerical projects for these changes and estimate specifically where they would occur," said Daniel Jones, one of the researchers, in a news release. "We were expecting some negative changes around the world, but the extent of changes, particularly in the North Atlantic, were staggering. Globally, we are talking about losses of marine life weighing more than every person on the planet put together.'

These projected changes aren't consistent across the globe. Yet most areas will experience negative change. Over 80 percent of all identified key habitats will suffer losses in total biomass, and animals will also become smaller.

The findings reveal a bit more about how climate change can impact even the far reaches of our world. This, in turn, shows that reducing the impacts of climate change is crucial for the future of fisheries and our world's ocean.

The findings are published in the journal Global Change Biology.