A third of seafloor marine life faces extinction

There is a bad news for marine life at the sea's surface. Over the next century, their food sources would dwindle, nutrient supplies would suffer and water masses would separate faster - all owing to impacts of climate change.

Using advanced climate models, a new study quantifies for the first time future losses in deep-sea marine life, saying that even the most remote deep-sea ecosystems are not safe from climate change threats.

"Seafloor marine life would decline by up to 38 percent in the North Atlantic and over five percent globally over the next century. These changes will be driven by a reduction in the plants and animals that live at the surface of the oceans that feed deep-sea communities. As a result, ecosystem services such as fishing will be threatened," predicted a team of researchers at National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, Britain.

The team used the latest suite of climate models to predict changes in food supply throughout the world oceans. They then applied a relationship between food supply and biomass calculated from a huge global database of marine life.

"There has been some speculation about climate change impacts on the seafloor, but we wanted to try and make numerical projections for these changes and estimate specifically where they would occur," said lead author Daniel Jones.

"We were expecting some negative changes around the world, but the extent of changes, particularly in the North Atlantic, were staggering. Globally we are talking about losses of marine life weighing more than every person on the planet put together," he added in the study, published in the scientific journal Global Change Biology.