British scientists have just detected something from space that should be read carefully in Jerusalem, though it concerns a sea more than two thousand miles away. Researchers at Plymouth Marine Laboratory, working through two decades of satellite data from 1997 to 2018, have found that the waters around the United Kingdom and across much of the north east Atlantic are photosynthesising less than they used to. The microscopic plants that form the base of all marine life, and that quietly absorb a large share of the carbon dioxide humanity emits, are in measurable decline.

The cause is not pollution or overfishing, though both play their part elsewhere. It is heat. As the surface of the sea warms, it separates into more stable layers, a process called stratification. Those layers resist mixing, and mixing is what carries nutrients up from the cold depths to the sunlit surface where phytoplankton grow. Warm the top, and you starve the engine. The Plymouth team, led by Dr Gavin Tilstone and Dr Peter Land and published this month in Frontiers in Remote Sensing, traced the decline precisely to rising sea surface temperature and the deepening calm that follows it.

For Britain this is a warning about the future. For Israel it is a description of the present. The reason the finding matters to Israel is that the Eastern Mediterranean has already travelled the road the Atlantic has only just started down.

The Levantine basin, the body of water lapping Israel’s coast, is among the warmest, saltiest........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)