ArticleNature communications2023
Hidden heatwaves and severe coral bleaching linked to mesoscale eddies and thermocline dynamics.
Article in Nature communications, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed, 86 citations in OpenAlex.
- Symbiont Identity Impacts Prokaryotic Microbiome Dynamics During Heat Stress in a Model System for Corals.Integrative and comparative biology · 2026Article
- Growth-predation risk tradeoffs constrain the local distribution of a thicket-forming Staghorn coral to marginal reef habitats.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- A long-term perspective to the effects of the 2023 marine heat wave on stony corals in the Caribbean.Biology letters · 2025Article
- Quantifying coral reef-ocean interactions is critical for predicting reef futures under climate change.Nature ecology & evolution · 2025Article
- Near complete local extinction of iconic anemonefish and their anemone hosts following a heat stress event.npj biodiversity · 2025Article
- Mesophotic reefs offer thermal refuge to the 2023 Caribbean mass bleaching event in the Cayman Islands.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Safety in the shallows: nearshore coastal habitats can provide physical and thermal features that optimize escape performance in newborn blacktip reef sharks (Conservation physiology · 2025Article
- Mapping the potential for global offshore finfish mariculture.Marine life science & technology · 2024Article
- Article
- The role of mesoscale-driven connectivity patterns in coral recovery around Moorea and Tahiti, French Polynesia.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Article
- Niche breadth and divergence in sympatric cryptic coral species (Evolutionary applications · 2024Article
- Climate change impacts on mesophotic regions of the Great Barrier Reef.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Thermal tolerance traits of individual corals are widely distributed across the Great Barrier Reef.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Physiologically informed organismal climatologies reveal unexpected spatiotemporal trends in temperature.Conservation physiology · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 5 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The severity of marine heatwaves (MHWs) that are increasingly impacting ocean ecosystems, including vulnerable coral reefs, has primarily been assessed using remotely sensed sea-surface temperatures (SSTs), without information relevant to heating across ecosystem depths. Here, using a rare combination of SST, high-resolution in-situ temperatures, and sea level anomalies observed over 15 years near Moorea, French Polynesia, we document subsurface MHWs that have been paradoxical in comparison to SST metrics and associated with unexpected coral bleaching across depths. Variations in the depth range and severity of MHWs was driven by mesoscale (10s to 100s of km) eddies that altered sea levels and thermocline depths and decreased (2007, 2017 and 2019) or increased (2012, 2015, 2016) internal-wave cooling. Pronounced eddy-induced reductions in internal waves during early 2019 contributed to a prolonged subsurface MHW and unexpectedly severe coral bleaching, with subsequent mortality offsetting almost a decade of coral recovery. Variability in mesoscale eddy fields, and thus thermocline depths, is expected to increase with climate change, which, along with strengthening and deepening stratification, could increase the occurrence of subsurface MHWs over ecosystems historically insulated from surface ocean heating by the cooling effects of internal waves.
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