Kristen Villebrun and Wendy Bush hoped they wouldn't have to pray for Chedoke Creek, but four years after they first raised alarm about the water's condition, they were part of an Indigenous full moon ceremony to do just that. About 50 people showed up near Princess Point on the dark and frigid Monday evening for the monthly ceremony, which was particularly special as it focused on Chedoke Creek. The body of water that runs into Cootes Paradise had about 24 billion litres of sewage and storm water runoff leak into it due to a gate being left open.
And a new threat is gradually emerging. Water temperatures are warming, thanks to a combination of climate change and human water management techniques. And in some places they’re growing hot enough to kill the fish. “We’ve seen instances where we’ve had die-offs of coldwater species,” said Kathryn Smith, a doctoral candidate in the Coastal Hydrology Lab at Dalhousie University in Canada.
It's been well documented that ocean temperatures have been on the rise across the globe for the past few decades. However what's happening with the warming waters in the North Atlantic over the past few weeks has the science community buzzing. Temperatures in the North Atlantic are warming at new record levels this spring, based on data compiled by NOAA satellites and produced by the University of Maine. In early June, sea surface temperatures in the North Atlantic were as warm as 0.5 degrees above the previous record and more than one degree above the 1982-2011 average.
Swirling blooms of turquoise phytoplankton along coasts may be happening more often and getting bigger, according to new research published in Nature, raising concerns about the impacts of climate change on the world's oceans. Using data captured by NASA's Aqua satellite, scientists have tracked coastal phytoplankton blooms over 17 years, between 2003 and 2020.
