The sea surface temperature in the Fijian archipelago in the southwestern Pacific is now at its maximum for more than 600 years.
The sea surface temperature in the Fijian archipelago in the southwestern Pacific is now at its maximum for more than 600 years. This is the result of an international research team's evaluation of a new coral record providing further evidence for unprecedented warming in the western Pacific Ocean. According to this, the year 2022 was the warmest year in the region since 1370. The scientists used the giant coral Diploastrea heliopora colony in Fiji to obtain the data for the new reconstruction. These unique and long-lived massive corals record long-term climatic and environmental changes in their chemical composition that have shaped the reef and the giants themselves over many centuries. They are vital archives of past climate variability across the tropics, often providing a direct link to human storylines of past experiences of climate variations.
The team collected a more than 2-meter-long core from this colony, which is growing only 3 to 6 millimeters per year, and analyzed its skeletal chemical composition to draw conclusions on the temperature variations over the course of 627 years. This was supplemented by the results of 26 years of instrumental measurements of water temperatures. The southwestern Pacific region is a major driver of climate variability, modulating for example the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, one of the main phenomena influencing global climate, thus affecting human activities and natural ecosystems worldwide.
Read more at Johannes Gutenberg Universitaet Mainz
Image: A coral of the species Diploastrea heliopora, commonly known as the honeycomb or brain coral (Credit: Photo/©: Joel Orempuller)
