Reshuffling of Marine Life

Guest: Ben Halpern, Ph.D., Professor in UC Santa Barbara’s Bren School of Environmental Science & Management and an Associate at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS)  Raging wild fires in the West and shrinking ice caps at the poles are two of the more visible effects of a changing climate. But two-thirds of the Earth is underwater, and life there is changing, too.  A group of scientists affiliated with UC Santa Barbara’s National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) has set out to understand how. Their latest findings suggest that as ocean temperatures rise, marine life begins to search for more suitable conditions, which has consequences for biodiversity and for communities such as fishermen who live off the sea.