Every year, as the surface water temperature off the United States' mid-Atlantic coast rises steadily from late spring through the summer, a pocket of uncharacteristically cool and crisp water gets trapped at the bottom of the ocean. Packed with nutrients, this thick band of cold water, known as the mid-Atlantic cold pool, is a vital home for shellfish species. Extending at its seasonal peak from Nantucket, Massachusetts, to Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, the cold pool creates a diverse ecosystem ranging from algae(海藻)to fish—and some of the most valuable shellfish fisheries in the United States.
Now, however, two pressures have scientists worrying about whether the cold pool will last. The first is no surprise: climate change. Over the past five decades, climate change has destabilized the cold pool, causing it to warm and shrink. Compared with 1968, the cold pool is now 13°℃ warmer and has lost more than one-third of its area.
The second concern is less certain. In 2023, the US federal government approved plans to install(安装)98wind turbines(涡轮机)off the New Jersey coast, covering an area of more than 300 square kilometers. Yet putting so many turbines to the seafloor could have unexpected consequences for the cold pool. That's why Travis Miles, are searcher at New Jersey's Rutgers University, and his colleagues are investigating. So far, Miles and his colleagues can't definitively say what will happen to the cold pool, saying more research is needed to assess how climate change and offshore wind, together, could affect the cold pool. However, their initial analyses suggest the cold pool should be fine—at least in normal conditions.
New Jersey's offshore wind plans are strongly opposed mainly by fossil fuel-industry funded efforts. Miles worries that an overabundance of caution or fear of potential impacts, including on the cold pool, might slow down the development of renewable energy. " . …. it's quite clear that climate change is far more damaging than installing wind farms, " he says. " I don't think any scientist would argue with that. "