A severe heatwave off north-western Western Australia hammered the world's largest region of seagrass, triggering the release of as much as nine million tonnes of carbon dioxide, a paper by international researchers has found.
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| Shark Bay, one of the world's largest intact seagrass regions was hammered in a marine heatwave that lasted two months in the summer of 2010-11. |
Two months of temperatures 2-4 degrees above average in the summer of 2010-11 resulted in the loss of about 1000 square-kilometres of seagrass in Shark Bay by 2014, or about a fifth of its extent, according to the paper which was published on Tuesday in Nature Climate Change.
Read Peter Hannam’s story from The Age - “‘Unprecedented' marine heatwave triggered huge carbon-dioxide release.”
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