Climate scientists have discovered a new archive of historical sea temperatures. With the help of the skeleton of a sponge that belongs to the Monorhaphis chuni species and that lived in the East China Sea for 11,000 years, an international team around scientists from the
Max Planck Institute for Chemistry were now able to show that the deep ocean temperature changed several times over the past millennia. As isotopic and elemental analyses showed, the sea water temperature in the vicinity of the sponge increased at least once from less than two degrees Celsius to six to ten degrees Celsius. These temperature changes were not previously known and are due to eruptions of seamounts.
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