Oceans are losing oxygen

Dead common murres lie washed up on a rocky beach in Whittier, Alaska on Jan. 7, 2016. A year after tens of thousands of common murres, an abundant North Pacific seabird, starved and washed ashore on beaches from California to Alaska, researchers have pinned the cause to unusually warm ocean temperatures that affected the tiny fish they eat. Now research shows a decline in dissolved oxygen in oceans around the world.

 Mark Thiessen - The Associated Press file
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A large research synthesis, published in one of the world's most influential scientific journals, has detected a decline in the amount of dissolved oxygen in oceans around the world - a long-predicted result of climate change that could have severe consequences for marine organisms if it continues.

The paper, published Wednesday in the journal Nature by oceanographer Sunke Schmidtko and two colleagues from the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Kiel, Germany, found a decline of more than 2 percent in ocean oxygen content worldwide between 1960 and 2010.

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