GLOBAL warming may turn large areas of ocean into oxygen deserts potentially unable to support life.
As the temperature rises, oxygen dissolves less well in water, and so begins to vanish from the sea. To determine to what extent this is already happening, Lothar Stramma of the University of Kiel in Germany and colleagues combined historical records of oceanic oxygen levels with more recent data, obtained from buoys equipped to measure oxygen, temperature and salinity.
The combined measurements show that over the past 50 years, oxygen levels in large areas of the Pacific and Atlantic oceans fell below 120 micromoles…
