For researchers, peering into Belize's Great Blue Hole is like peering into history—and, in a sense, into the future as well. Unfortunately, their findings indicate storm clouds are on the horizon. From the bottom of the 410-foot-deep underwater sinkhole, scientists from universities across Germany extracted a nearly 100-foot-long sediment core that offers "the longest continuous record of tropical storms in the area," per Live Science. The core showed that the frequency of the region's tropical cyclones has continuously increased over the past 5,700 years, especially in the last two decades.
Two layers of "fair-weather" gray-green sediment are deposited in the Great Blue Hole in an average year, allowing researchers to "count back the years like the rings of a tree and compare when storm-event sediment layers were deposited," per Live Science. Between four and 16 tropical storms and hurricanes—indicated by coarser, lighter-colored particles tossed into the hole from the atoll's outer reef—were found to have hit the region per century over millennia, per Earth.com. But there was a marked increase in frequency around the Industrial Revolution, when humans began burning fossil fuels, per Live Science. And in just the last 20 years, there've been nine tropical storms in the area, researchers say.
"Remarkably, the frequency of storm landfalls in the study area has been much higher in the last two decades than in the last six millennia—a clear indication of the influence of modern global warming," Dominik Schmitt, lead author of the study published March 14 in Science Advances, tells Live Science. As sea surface temperatures rise, so does the likelihood of tropical storms. Based on the findings, we can expect that "extreme weather events in this region will become much more frequent in the 21st century," Schmitt adds. The study estimates up to 45 tropical storms and hurricanes could slam the Caribbean by 2100. (More tropical storms stories.)
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