Editors’ Highlights are summaries of recent papers by AGU’s journal editors.
Source: AGU Advances
Climate model projections for the Pacific basin suggest that warming waters will cause high-oxygen regions in the subtropical North Pacific to lose dissolved oxygen and low-oxygen regions in the Tropical Pacific to gain dissolved oxygen. The meridional change in dissolved oxygen loss modifies water age, with subtropical North Pacific waters becoming older (less oxygen) and Tropical Pacific waters becoming younger (more oxygen).
In a model-based study, Taylor et al. [2026] show that this meridional contrast in oxygen and water mass age change arises from a slowdown of vertical velocities that is driven by a combination of Pacific basin and remote Southern Ocean heat forcing. Warming and stratification of the upper Pacific basin compresses the subtropical gyre, reducing ventilation along the base of the North Pacific ventilated thermocline. Warming in the mid-latitude Southern Ocean remotely reduces upwelling of old, low-oxygen water in the Tropical and North Pacific. This sets up the counterintuitive finding of “young gets older, but old gets younger.”
Citation: Taylor, B. A., Eddebbar, Y. A., Takano, Y., Talley, L. D., & Xie, S.-P. (2026). “Young get older, but old get younger”: Warming-induced circulation change explains contrasting pattern of projected Pacific deoxygenation. AGU Advances, 7, e2025AV002278. https://doi.org/10.1029/2025AV002278
—Eileen Hofmann, Editor, AGU Advances
Text © 2026. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
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