As drought spread and wildfires raged across Europe this summer, the extraordinary heat didn’t stop at the shoreline. European waters notched their hottest summer months since satellite sensors began providing reliable data in 1982, according to a Reuters analysis of temperatures recorded at the seas’ surface.
Records fell from the English Channel to the Mediterranean Sea, with an offshore buoy near Mallorca recording a temperature of 33.02 degrees Celsius (91.44 degrees Fahrenheit) on August 5, the highest ever registered in the Spanish port authority’s buoy network.
Scientists warn that events like this year’s marine heatwaves are becoming more frequent, more intense and more widespread as greenhouse-gas emissions drive up atmospheric temperatures around the globe.
The world’s oceans absorb the majority of the excess heat and retain it longer than the land or atmosphere.
That’s transforming marine ecosystems, with catastrophic consequences for some European fisheries and the people who rely on them, according to a review of the scientific literature and interviews with more than a dozen researchers, fishing industry sources and analysts.
Species that have sustained some coastal communities in Spain and southern England for generations are disappearing, as unfamiliar arrivals surge into newly hospitable waters.
“What is surprising is the speed at which this occurs,” Jean-Pierre Gattuso, senior research scientist at France’s National Centre for Scientific Research, said of Europe’s warming seas. “Records are broken almost every day in many places.”Taken together, European seas averaged 21.6 C (70.9 F) between June and August, the highest in 45 years of available data.
