Marine Heatwaves Rising
I took a short dive into marine heatwaves--the phenomenon of extra-warm patches of water--and was worried by what I found. Read my feature for Yale e360 here: https://e360.yale.edu/features/as-waters-warm-ocean-heatwaves-are-growing-more-severe The condensed version: 1. A record-breaking Blob of warm water formed off the coast of North America this summer. It didn't get much press, perhaps eclipsed by wildfires and the pandemic. But it was (and still is) there! 2. There's an interesting debate about how to define marine heatwaves. Under the current definition, which is measured against an historic baseline, marine heatwaves are becoming more common (and indeed we will be in a "near permanent heatwave" by 2100) simply because the ocean is getting warmer overall... not because heatwaves in and of themselves are becoming more wavy, per se. Untangling the different ways of looking at heatwaves will be interesting! 3. No matter how you define heatwaves, the underlying prob...