Rise in water temperatures raise concerns for impact on Cape Fear area
FORT FISHER, NC (WWAY) — On Monday, July 24th, a water temperature over 101 degrees was recorded on a buoy between the Everglades and Key Largo.
While the Cape Fear is some 800 miles away, the high water temps in the Florida Keys are indeed raising alarms here.
For most marine life, even an increase of just a few degrees can greatly affect them.
Rising water temperatures can spark migrations of entire species, both marine and on-land.
Andy Gould is the education curator at the North Carolina Aquarium at Fort Fisher.
He said the biggest worry is the uncertainty of how such an increase would actually affect marine life and the wider Cape Fear ecosystem.
“It would be really hard to tell what exactly would be impacted because we’ve never seen temperatures like this before so we can only kind of guess at things,” Gould said. But we have a lot of species of migratory sharks, fish, birds, and marine mammals like dolphins and whales and any of them could be impacted by this. We also have a species of jellyfish whose reproductive cycles are based on temperature and may cause them to breed more often and for us to see more jellies out on the ocean.”
Gould also said the Cape Fear fishing industry could also be affected, as various species leave the area for cooler waters.
But that’s not the only effect rising water temperatures can have.
“Any time that the water, especially ocean water, gets warmer, there’s greater potential for that to go up into the atmosphere and then come back down as rain,” Doug Gamble, a climatologist at UNCW said. “So that’s why you might see some more intense rainstorms. And that’s what the prediction is with hurricanes is not that there’s going to be more hurricanes but when they do occur, they’ll be more intense because there’s more energy in the water.”
Gamble also said it’s possible that we won’t just see rising water and air temperatures during the summer, but lower winter temperatures as well, caused by climate change.
