World’s oceans are losing oxygen rapidly, posing a threat to marine life

Dead sardines in Redondo Beach, California. Credit: Noaki Schwartz/Associated Press.

Kendra Pierre-Louis, a reporter on the New York Times climate team, writes in today's edition:

The world’s oceans are gasping for breath.

Read on to find out more about a new report that says oxygen levels in the world’s oceans declined by 2 percent over 50 years, threatening marine life around the planet.

This is one of the newer classes of impacts to rise into the public awareness. And we see this along the coast of California with these mass fish die-offs as the most dramatic example of this kind of creep of deoxygenation on the coastal ocean. — Dr. Kim Cobb, climate scientist and professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology.