What may turn out to be the summer’s most important news story (and just possibly the millennium’s) didn’t make the pages of the Times. A study in Nature last week concluded that as oceans warmed, phytoplankton—the tiny organisms that form the crucial first level of the entire marine food chain—were disappearing. In fact, since you need a subscription to read the whole study, let me reprint the key portion of the abstract here:
In the oceans, ubiquitous microscopic phototrophs (phytoplankton) account for approximately half the production of organic matter on Earth…. We observe declines in eight out of ten ocean regions, and estimate a global rate of decline of ~1% of the global median per year.
See full Article.
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