Take Two translates the day’s headlines for Southern California, making sense of the news and cultural events that affect our lives. Produced by Southern California Public Radio and broadcast from October 2012 – June 2021. Hosted by A Martinez.
When you think of oxygen, you probably think of the air we breathe. But it's just as important to life in the ocean as it is to things that live on land.
But new research predicts an alarming trend - a dramatic loss of oxygen in the world's oceans due to ocean warming.
There are always low oxygen zones in the interior of the ocean. But these zones are getting bigger, and they aren't so hospitable to most species of fish and shellfish.
In order to learn more about the effects of this environmental change, researchers at UC Davis recently took a look way back, more than ten thousand years ago, to see how the oxygen loss might affect ocean life today.
Researchers looked at ocean sediment records from the last deglaciation. That's the time when the Earth transitioned out of the Ice Age - and the last time the planet has abruptly warmed. Their findings were recently published in Plos One.
For more, Dr. Sarah Moffitt joined Take Two. She's the study's lead researcher and a post-doctoral scholar at the UC Davis Bodega Marine Laboratory.