A giant “bubble” of hot water appears in the South Pacific and alarms scientists
It is a sea area located in Oceania and is four times larger than New Zealand
In the waters of the South Pacific, a phenomenon has appeared that adds to the heat wave experienced by the countries of Oceania. It is a giant "bubble" that appears on heat maps as a dark red patch and covers at least one million square kilometers, four times larger than New Zealand.
It is an aquatic mass whose temperature increase has caught the attention of scientists, as it is presented at 5ºC above average. "Normally temperatures are about 15 ° C, right now they are about 20 ° C," said James Renwick, a scientist at the University of Victoria in Wellington, at NZ Herald.
The emergence of this phenomenon could be due to the increase in atmospheric emissions of greenhouse gases, resulting from climate change, according to The guardian. Although there is another hypothesis that scientists also handle, a strong high-pressure system that adds to the lack of wind, that is, an anticyclone that occurs when a mass of air cools, contracts and becomes denser, which causes the weight of the atmosphere and the air pressure on the surface to increase, and therefore the temperature increases.
Phenomena like this can be more dangerous for the oceans. The NIWA (National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research of New Zealand recalled that last November the historical record of high temperatures in this country was broken, as well as that in mid-December the thermometers rose again in good part of the islands.
Experts study the incidence in larger processes. Forest fires, which keep the population on alert, are aggravated, and dozens of koalas have been affected by the heat wave. On the other hand, the World Meteorological Organization notes that the last decade has been the hottest recorded worldwide, both on land and in oceans.
