A new study from MIT finds that climate change is altering the color of the ocean. The research finds more than half of the world's oceans will shift color by the year 2100, with the blues getting bluer and the greens getting greener. And it's all about the plankton. The color of the ocean depends on the stuff floating around in it. That includes phytoplankton, the tiny algae at the bottom of the food web.
MIT's Stephanie Dutkiewicz used a computer model to predict the effects of climate change on phytoplankton, by looking at shifts in the ocean's color.
"We not going to suddenly go from having a blue ocean to a red ocean or something like that, but there will be the very, very subtle changes," Dutkiewicz says. "But they're important because they tell us a lot about what's changing in the ocean."
Dutkiewicz says ocean warming is already changing the types of phytoplankton and where they live, maybe faster than animals can keep up.
WBUR's Barbara Moran produced this story for the New England News Collaborative.
