{"id":134380,"date":"2025-11-15T08:09:17","date_gmt":"2025-11-15T08:09:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/134380\/"},"modified":"2025-11-15T08:09:17","modified_gmt":"2025-11-15T08:09:17","slug":"amazon-lakes-became-hotter-than-a-hot-tub-killing-hundreds-of-dolphins-sciencealert","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/134380\/","title":{"rendered":"Amazon Lakes Became Hotter Than a Hot Tub, Killing Hundreds of Dolphins : ScienceAlert"},"content":{"rendered":"

In 2023, a severe drought heated several Amazonian lakes until they became hotter than a hot tub<\/a>. Brazil’s Lake Tef\u00e9 hit 41.0 \u00b0C (105.8 \u00b0F).<\/p>\n

The resulting conditions killed more than 200 dolphins, countless fish, and many other aquatic animals by the thousands.<\/p>\n

From the world’s reefs<\/a>, to eels<\/a>, birds<\/a> and African elephants<\/a>, this is yet another mass mortality event<\/a> of Earth’s wildlife now attributed to climate change<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Related: Amazon Rainforest Facing Drastic Collapse From 2050, Scientists Warn<\/a><\/p>\n

“The climate emergency is here, there is no doubt about it,” hydrologist Ayan Fleischmann, who was sent to investigate the lake incident, told<\/a> AFP.<\/p>\n

\"Local fishermen and field assistants place a captured Amazon river dolphin on a stretcher in Lake Amana, near Tef\u00e9, Amazonas, Brazil on 25 September 2025. (Miguel Monteiro\/AFP\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n

Fleischmann, based at the Mamirau\u00e1 Institute for Sustainable Development in Brazil, and colleagues compiled satellite data and direct measurements of the lakes in the region during the 2023 drought.<\/p>\n

They determined a confluence of conditions conspired to create the Amazonian lakes environmental disaster, including low wind speeds, low water depths, very high solar radiation during 11 days without cloud cover, and hazier water which absorbed more of that sunlight.<\/p>\n

“This unprecedented drought intensity has been attributed to climate change, including widespread warming of the oceans, in particular of the North Atlantic, in combination with a moderate to strong El Ni\u00f1o event,” the team write in their paper<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Temperatures exceeded 37 \u00b0C in 5 of the 10 lakes examined, but it was likely the extreme temperature swings of up to 13 \u00b0C that caused the fatal thermal stress in wildlife.<\/p>\n

“A 10 \u00b0C increase in water temperature is unparalleled,” University of Greenwich ecologist Adrian Barnett, who was not involved in the study, told<\/a> journalist Phoebe Weston at The Guardian. “The volume of energy needed to achieve this in such huge volumes of water is jaw-dropping.”<\/p>\n

\"AmazonA dead tucuxi dolphin in Lake Tef\u00e9, 2023. (Andr\u00e9 Zumak\/Mamirau\u00e1 Institute<\/a>)<\/p>\n

At the time, the World Wildlife Fund reported<\/a> a loss of 10 percent of the local dolphin population within just one week, including 130 pink river dolphins (Inia geoffrensis<\/a>) and 23 tucuxi dolphins (Sotalia fluviatilis<\/a>), both endangered species.<\/p>\n

Those numbers would continue to rise, totaling around 330 dolphin carcasses<\/a> found around the lakes.<\/p>\n

“When the water reaches 41 \u00b0C, the fish simply stop functioning: their enzymes get blocked, their metabolism collapses and they die,” Adalberto Val, biologist from the Brazilian Amazon Research Institute, told<\/a> Noticias Ambientales.<\/p>\n

This region, including Earth’s largest remaining tract of tropical rainforest, holds about a fifth of Earth’s freshwater,<\/a> but the changing climate conditions are drying that up.<\/p>\n

\"Win<\/a><\/p>\n

Scientists have already warned of the Amazon rainforests’ fast-approaching collapse<\/a>. Now Fleischmann and colleagues have found that the average water temperatures of flood-plain lakes in the central Amazon region have increased by 0.6 \u00b0C per decade since 1990.<\/p>\n

“We are concerned that these conditions are becoming more common,” says<\/a> John Melack, ecologist at UC Santa Barbara. “The implications for biodiversity and local communities are profound.”<\/p>\n

This is not a problem that can be solved regionally, researchers warn<\/a>, as it requires a global systemic effort in fossil fuel use reduction<\/a>. Unless that happens, we’ll continue to extinguish ever more massive swaths of the most miraculous things in the known Universe: living beings, including ourselves.<\/p>\n

This research was published in Science<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In 2023, a severe drought heated several Amazonian lakes until they became hotter than a hot tub. Brazil’s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":134381,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[242,85,46,371,141],"class_list":["post-134380","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-environment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-msft-content","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134380","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=134380"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134380\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/134381"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=134380"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=134380"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=134380"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}