DRAFTING (Nov 2025)
RUCOOL Researchers Find Decades of Warming and Salinity Changes in the Caribbean Sea
Rutgers University, July 22, 2025. “A new study led by Rutgers researchers reports long-term warming and shifts in salinity in the Caribbean Through‑Flow (CTF), a major ocean current that connects the tropics to the North Atlantic. The findings, published in Nature Scientific Reports, suggest that ongoing changes in this region may play a role in influencing broader ocean and climate dynamics.Using more than six decades of oceanographic data, the research team found that the upper 200 meters of the CTF has been steadily warming and changing in salinity since 1960. Specifically, the study found subsurface warming of about 0.2 °C per decade, surface freshening of approximately 0.13 g kg⁻¹ per decade and increased salinity at deeper levels of around 0.05 g kg⁻¹ per decade.These trends suggest that CTF, a key ocean pathway, is undergoing changes at a rate faster than the global ocean average for similar depths…”
Physical environments of the Caribbean Sea
Iliana Chollett et al., 2012. Limnology & Oceanography 57(4): 1233–1244
PDF available Informative maps. “The Caribbean Sea encompasses a vast range of physical environmental conditions that have a profound influence on the organisms that live there. Here we utilize a range of satellite and in situ products to undertake a region-wide categorization of the physical environments of the Caribbean Sea (PECS). The classification approach is hierarchical and focuses on physical constraints that drive many aspects of coastal ecology, including species distributions, ecosystem function, and disturbance. The first level represents physicochemical properties including metrics of satellite sea surface temperature, water clarity, and in situ salinity. The second level considers mechanical disturbance and includes both chronic disturbance from wind-driven wave exposure and acute disturbance from hurricanes… Because physical environments underpin so much of coastal ecosystem structure and function, we anticipate that the PECS classification, which will be freely distributed as geographic information system layers, will facilitate comparative analyses and inform the stratification of studies across environmental provinces in the Caribbean basin.”