Search Here

In an alarming revelation, it has been observed that the lakes around the world are warming faster than the air temperatures and the oceans. This shows how climate change may be impacting the freshwater landscape more than anything else. As per the report published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters announced its findings at the fall meeting of the of the American Geophysical Union. The lakes around the world have warmed an average of 0.61 degrees Fahrenheit per decade, between 1985 and 2009. In northern climates, that increase grew to an average of 1.3 degrees per decade. "The world's deepest ice-covered lakes warmed twice as fast as the overlying air temperatures," the report notes, as reported by Pioneer Press Twin Cities.

One of the basic factors of a lake's ecosystem are its temperatures, said the study authors. When "the temperature swings quickly and widely from the norm, life-forms in a lake can change dramatically and even disappear." The study included only 225 lakes that account for more than half of the world's freshwater lakes. "These results suggest that large changes in our lakes are not only unavoidable, but are probably already happening," said Catherine O'Reilly, associate professor of geology at Illinois State University and lead author of the report, in a statement released with the report, as per Science Mag.

According to the scientists, the rapid warming of the lakes is greater than the warming rate of air and the oceans that can have overwhelming impact on the environment. 'Society depends on surface water for the vast majority of human uses,' said co-author Stephanie Hampton, director of Washington State University's Center for Environmental Research, Education and Outreach in Pullman. 'Not just for drinking water, but manufacturing, for energy production, for irrigation of our crops. Protein from freshwater fish is especially important in the developing world.' As warming of the lakes increases over the next century, algal blooms can strip the lakes of its oxygen, that is projected to increase by 20% in the lakes, reports Daily Mail.