Environmental history told by sludge: Global warming lets the dead zones in the Black Sea grow

Geoscientists IOW, the universities of Oldenburg and Hannover as well as Rutgers University (USA) succeeded now in reconstructing the depositional environment of the last interglacial (Eemian, 128,000 years ago) in the Black Sea with unprecedented details. This enabled for the first time a direct comparison between the current oxygen-depleted conditions in the deep water with those during the Eemian when the water temperatures in summer were 3° higher. It shows that the dead zones of the Black Sea will most probably expand by a future global warming, leading to a significant shrinking of the productive zone in the surface water.

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