Record High 2024 Sea Surface Temperatures: Impacts on coral reefs and ocean circulation

[Tom Goreau]

2024 SST shows changes in ocean circulation leading to climate feedbacks. Draft preprint:

 

https://www.globalcoral.org/2024-record-temperature-effects-on-coral-bleaching-ocean-circulation/

 

 

Record High 2024 Sea Surface Temperatures:

Impacts on coral reefs and ocean circulation

 

Thomas J. F. Goreau, Raymond L. Hayes, and Thomas P. Sarkisian

Global Coral Reef Alliance

 

 

Abstract

 

2024 surpassed 2023 as the hottest year in recorded history (Cheng et al., 2025; Copernicus, 2025, https://climate.copernicus.eu/global-climate-highlights-2024). During 2024 Extremely High Sea Surface Temperature Events (EHSSTEs, here referred to as “HotSpots”) proliferated over larger oceanic areas, extended deeper, and persisted longer, than since global SST satellite mapping began in the 1980s. Record High SSTs caused coral bleaching mortality in every coral reef region of the world during 2024 except the Hawaiian Islands, including West Papua, which had never suffered high temperature bleaching. SST patterns in 2024 continued to show accelerated global heat transport from the tropics to polar regions and reduction in ocean vertical mixing. Both act as strong positive climate feedbacks by increasing global warming, Arctic amplification, ice melting, and global sea level rise, while reducing ocean overturning circulation. Coral reefs are undergoing accelerating extinctive evolution, as each new hotter HotSpot causes death of more temperature-sensitive coral populations, and the species that depend on them for food and shelter. They are being replaced by weedy and invasive coral species that provide inferior ecosystem services and exotic species that smother, but don’t build, reefs, causing increasing shore erosion. As the result of the last two record hot years, coral ecosystem collapse is now at the point that only direct cooling methods, such as increases in earth’s sunlight reflectivity, can possibly reduce ocean surface temperature fast enough to save the rain forests of the ocean from impending ecocide.

 

 

Thomas J. F. Goreau, PhD
President, Global Coral Reef Alliance

Chief Scientist, Blue Regeneration SL
President, Biorock Technology Inc.

Technical Advisor, Blue Guardians Programme, SIDS DOCK

37 Pleasant Street, Cambridge, MA 02139

gor...@globalcoral.org
www.globalcoral.org
Skype: tomgoreau
Tel: (1) 617-864-4226 (leave message)

 

Books:

Geotherapy: Innovative Methods of Soil Fertility Restoration, Carbon Sequestration, and Reversing CO2 Increase

http://www.crcpress.com/product/isbn/9781466595392

 

Innovative Methods of Marine Ecosystem Restoration

http://www.crcpress.com/product/isbn/9781466557734

 

Geotherapy: Regenerating ecosystem services to reverse climate change

 

No one can change the past, everybody can change the future

 

It’s much later than we think, especially if we don’t think

 

Those with their heads in the sand will see the light when global warming and sea level rise wash the beach away

 

“When you run to the rocks, the rocks will be melting, when you run to the sea, the sea will be boiling”, Peter Tosh, Jamaica’s greatest song writer

 

“The Earth is not dying, she is being killed” U. Utah Phillips