August 9, 2022 — Nearly a millennium of cooling in the Gulf of Maine has been reversed over the past century.
That’s the finding of a new study, published in the journal Communications Earth and Environment, led by Massachusetts-based Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, co-written by the University of Maine and funded by the National Science Foundation.
Scientists have long warned that the Gulf of Maine is warming faster than most of the world’s oceans — 2021 was yet another year of record warmth — but the lack of long-term records has made it difficult to compare the 20th and 21st centuries to warming or cooling trends for past periods.
The oldest records available come from a station in Boothbay Harbor, where surface water temperatures have been tracked since 1905.