Dr Schoeman said: “Our study has very significant global, national and local dimensions – from flagging up concern about the future of coral life in parts of the western Pacific Ocean to heightening awareness about the spreading effects of warming around our own coastline.”

Temperature bands are moving pole wards, spring temperatures are arriving earlier and autumn temperatures are coming later. Other side-effects could be even more profound as global greenhouse gas emissions increase.

Regional variations mean that in many areas marine organisms must respond much more rapidly to changing climate than their counterparts on land. The study examined the speed and direction at which land and marine life must travel to remain in their preferred temperatures. Whereas fish can swim several kilometers, other bio-organisms such as coral are static.

Dr Schoeman said: “Corals are critically important for marine biodiversity because about a quarter of the species of fish that we know about in the ocean are associated with corals, as are many other forms of marine life.”

The world’s largest concentrations of corals are found in areas of the Pacific near Indonesia and the Philippines, an area also important for other marine biodiversity. For systems like this, the outlook is grim, he added.

However, temperature changes are not only affecting tropical oceans, but also colder seas like the Northern Atlantic. Northern Ireland is in a fascinating position, Dr Schoeman explained. “The warming ocean should tend to shift species northwards along the Irish east and west coasts, converging on the north Antrim coast. Interestingly, temperatures are moving up the east coast at 5 km to 10 km per year but at only half that rate up the west coast.”

The work was led by Dr Michael Burrows, from the Scottish Association for Marine Science, and Dr Schoeman from the Environmental Sciences Research Institute at Ulster’s Coleraine campus, and was funded by the US National Science Foundation via the US National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, University of California Santa Barbara.

The study was published in Science 4 November 2011: 652-655.DOI:10.1126/science.1210288 - The Pace of Shifting Climate in Marine and Terrestrial Ecosystems, Burrows, et al.

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