clipped from: www.telegraph.co.uk   

Underwater "deserts" are emerging in tropical oceans as the oxygen vanishes from seawater, warns a new study.

  • Wetter Arctic may lead to colder winters
  • Reservoirs keep sea levels down
  • Global warming impact may be overstated

    • One of the consequences of a changing climate, the warmer oceans, is causing a decrease in the oxygen concentration and creating oxygen-starved, or "hypoxic" conditions underwater.

    The low-oxygen zones at depths of around 500 metres near India and in the equatorial Pacific waters off the Americas have grown thicker during the past 50 years, says a report in the journal Science.

    This will likely have far-reaching impacts on ecosystems because key organisms cannot survive in these zones, warn Dr Lothar Stramma of Kiel University in Germany
    using historical data combined with recent measurements to find that these oxygen starved zones are expanding significantly, especially in tropical regions of the Atlantic Ocean.