Marine Ocean Hurricane Sandy

Families are stuck in their homes without electricity, and the streets outside are flooded. Winds are up to 80 miles per hour; trees and power lines have been knocked down. It is 8:00 on October 29th, 2012. A category two hurricane, Hurricane Sandy, has hit the Jersey Shore. Hurricane Sandy left 8.5 million people without power, caused about $20 billion in property damage, and killed about 150 people (Sharp). Water temperatures off of the East coast were abnormally warm during the summer and fall, which made the force and strength of Sandy even greater (Freedman). The average ocean temperature has risen about 0.18℉ in the past century (“Sea Temperature Rise”). A fraction of a degree may not seem like a lot, but it creates many problems that …show more content…
Marine ecosystems and organisms are more sensitive to temperature change than land ecosystems and organisms. The most vulnerable to temperature change is corals. Corals tend to bleach, or eject their symbiotic algae, at a slight temperature rise. When corals bleach, it slows their growth and makes them more vulnerable to disease, which can lead to a reef die-off (“Sea Temperature Rise”). If corals bleach too often, they are more likely to starve, shrink, and die. Thousands of species live on coral, and if more corals are dying, these species will suffer as well (Fujita). Krill populations have dropped by 80% because they like to breed in colder waters (“What is Happening in the Ocean?”). They are an important link at the base of the food chain, and they reproduce in notably smaller numbers when temperatures rise. This disrupts the life cycle of organisms that eat krill, which causes food shortages for higher predators (“Sea Temperature Rise”). Algae are also affected by warmer ocean temperatures because they cannot complete photosynthesis if the water is too warm. They share the food they make from photosynthesis with corals, and in the end corals lose their food sources and become weak (“What is Happening in the Ocean?”). Many types of plankton are affected by warmer oceans, and researchers found that when ocean temperatures rise, phytoplankton grow, but so do zooplankton and bacteria. The zooplankton grow faster and eat all of the phytoplankton, and this creates a bottleneck in the food chain that could create problems for the ocean’s food web. More than 100 million tons of carbon dioxide is absorbed into the ocean each day (“Sea Temperature”). Phytoplankton’s job is to suck up carbon dioxide through photosynthesis, and with less plankton, more carbon dioxide stays in the water (Biello). Changes in ocean temperature can affect what species