The paper contributes to our knowledge of the impact of marine heat waves on ecosystems, a subject that is topical and that we know little of. The impact on coccolithophores is important for carbon uptake. The impact of MHW more generally on algal blooms is also important for higher trophic levels, the wider ecosystem, and for commercial interests such as aquaculture. The study gives useful confirmation that the environmental ranges defined by O’Brien et al for coccolithophore blooms do seem to apply even in these anomalous MHW conditions and in two separate regions.

Oxygen is fundamental to ocean biogeochemical processes, with deoxygenation potentially reducing biodiversity, and disrupting biogeochemical cycles. This paper develops and implements a new inverse method to decompose oxygen change into its constituent parts by linking each process to concomitant changes in temperature and dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC). They apply this method to a GO-SHIP repeated section of the North Atlantic Ocean. They find that alterations in remineralisation, either local or upstream, are responsible for up to half of the total oxygen decrease seen in the upper 2000 m between 1992 and 2015. This method could be repeated on any dataset, observations or model, that includes temperature, DIC, and oxygen concentration data.