This one is for the cascading consequences section.
Our newly published study introduces the phenomenon of “marine darkwaves”: sudden, intense episodes of underwater darkness that can last from days to months and push marine ecosystems into acute stress.
Darkness events are often triggered by storms, floods, sediment plumes or algal blooms. As with marine heatwaves, these short, intense episodes can be just as ecologically disruptive as slow, long-term trends.
For many years now, scientists have tracked a phenomenon called ocean darkening – a long-term, gradual drop in water clarity that limits the amount of light that can penetrate the water column associated with declining kelp forests, delayed phytoplankton blooms, stressed coral reefs, and shrinking seagrass meadows.
But that’s a slow, steady change that has been marching on for decades. It doesn’t include the short, intense, episodic periods of darkness driven by storms, algal blooms, and sediment deposition, often following natural events such as wildfires, cyclones, and mudslides.
These intense periods of darkening – the marine darkwaves – can be just as damaging as the slower long-term dimming, the researchers say.
So sad. All those folds within folds of complex interwoven systems - and we just don’t see.