How will you know if someone is peeing in the ocean near you?
New York Times:
In Florida, Swimmers Brave an Ocean That Feels Like Steamy Syrup
The water temperature near Key Biscayne, a barrier island just east of Miami, had already passed 89 degrees one morning this week. And though the ocean off South Florida was slightly cooler than the recent record highs that had stunned scientists and threatened marine life, it remained phenomenally hot.
But on this serene patch of the Atlantic Coast, it was still a summer day at the beach, when nothing satisfies quite like a dip — even when the ocean feels like a thick, simmering syrup. Almost gooey.
“I like it warm,” shrugged Niki Candela, 20, a Miami native, moments after a powerful siren warned of approaching lightning.
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The water in South Florida is always warm this time of year, but unusually so this year, with six record-high temperatures measured off Virginia Key this month. The sea surface hit 98 degrees in some areas of Florida Bay last week; the average ocean temperature in Miami in July is around 86.
Miami’s unrelenting heat this summer has meant 16 consecutive days with a heat index at or above 105 degrees, a record, according to Brian McNoldy, a senior research scientist at the University of Miami. The National Weather Service forecast a heat index of 110 degrees on Sunday, issuing its first ever extreme heat advisory for Miami-Dade County.
At the beach the next day, the scorching sand was to be avoided at all costs. “Talk to me here, so I don’t burn my feet,” Eduardo Valades, 51, told a reporter, beckoning toward the lapping water.
This week, toweling off seemed unnecessary: No one felt cold leaving the water.
“It feels like a Jacuzzi!” Sasha Mishenina told her two friends following a brief dip. They had declined to join her.
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“I’m so happy, because they said we were going to have the sargassum,” Adriana Campuzano said of predictions earlier this year, as she was gathering her stuff to leave before the looming thunderstorm. “It’s clearer than it’s been in years. Maybe in a decade.”
Ms. Candela, the Miami native, had come to the beach with three friends. The ocean felt fine, she said, though she added that sometimes with such hot water, “you think, ‘What if someone’s peeing here?’”
NPR:
She and her friends laid out their towels on beach chairs under an umbrella, put music on and waded in.
“It actually feels pretty cold,” Taylor Dutil, 20, a fellow Floridian, said.
“It’s a good change,” said Benny Perez, 22, who is from Chicago, where Lake Michigan was far cooler that day.
The siren blared three more times, signaling the end of the lightning threat. Not a raindrop had fallen. The four friends stayed in the water, chatting and laughing.
An ocean heat wave in waters around Florida has scientists worried about cascading disasters, from fueling hurricanes and coral bleaching to exacerbating record heat on land.
Ocean temperatures have soared five degrees above normal since early July. This warming has been ignited by an El Nino weather pattern that’s collided with human-caused climate change.
“It’s bonkers. I don’t know how else to put it,” said Ben Kirtman, an atmospheric scientist with the University of Miami Rosenstiel School. “Normally when you break records, you break records by a tenth of a degree, maybe a quarter of a degree….Here, we’re breaking it by five degrees.”
If scientists were to model the chances for such a spike in temperature, he said, it would amount to one in 250,000 years.
“It’s out of bounds from what we’ve seen,” Kirtman said.
Summertime seas around South Florida typically average about 88 degrees. But beginning in July, ocean monitors stationed along the coast began recording temperatures hovering in the low 90s. In Florida Bay, the wide shallow bay between the Florida Keys and the Gulf of Mexico, temperatures climbed above 98 degrees.
South Florida’s ocean heat wave arrived as global ocean temperatures have steadily climbed since April. That prompted forecasters at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to predict that half the planet’s oceans could undergo heat waves by September.
In its last assessment of the warming planet, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found the Earth has heated up 2 degrees Fahrenheit in the past two centuries. Scientists warned that marine heat waves, like the one inflaming waters around Florida, would become more commonplace. That increasing heat, the IPCC said, could likely push some sea life “to the limits of their resilience.”
South Florida is already seeing some impacts. Warmer ocean waters reduce oxygen levels and that could impact fish populations. Three years ago a rare fish kill spread across waters off Miami as rising temperatures sucked oxygen from Biscayne Bay. Warming waters could also endanger spawning grounds for Atlantic bluefin tuna in the northern Gulf of Mexico, one of only two places where these tuna spawn. Hotter seas around Florida could also warm tradewinds that help cool the state. That could exacerbate record heat already occurring on land.