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The Gulf’s heating faster than the world's oceans. Louisiana is at ground zero. 44%
By Alex Lubben65%
7/19/2026, 9:00:00 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 30 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, Pessimism Bias, and Hasty Generalization, with Appeal to Authority as the most egregious example at 19.8% saturation with 313 hits. Analysis detected 2,079 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,584 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 47.6% and a BS Rank of 44% (10,318 of 18,332 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 56.30% of the article peer group.
Batting away snakes, Wilkie Declouet trudged through chest-deep water to reach his front door.
Hurricane Ida had flooded Ironton, a small historic Black community down the Mississippi River from New Orleans, only 10 miles outside the levee system that protects the city.
Declouet, a 61-year-old father of four, was the first to return.
His house, raised on piers, had held.
Almost nothing else had.
A weathered white casket was stuck upright in the tangle the flood left behind.
Inside it was a man Declouet had known.
At least a dozen caskets lay scattered around Ironton for weeks after the storm.
The Gulf of Mexico, which the Trump administration has renamed the Gulf of America, is in the throes of a turbulent new era that holds enormous consequences for Louisiana and the other states along its coast.
It has become one of the fastest-warming bodies of water in the world, new research is showing.
Human-caused climate change is fusing with cyclical weather patterns to create the new reality.
“The people of the Gulf have long lived with the risks of living on this marginal ocean.
But in recent years, it’s become obvious that it’s heating dramatically.
That has huge implications for the rapid intensification of hurricanes as well as for accelerated sea-level rise.”
“These are not theoretical concepts that people keep talking about.
Your insurance increases, you have water damage, you have damage to your house,” said Donald Boesch, a professor of marine science at the University of Maryland who previously served as the first director of the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium.
“The Gulf’s heating faster than the world's oceans.
Louisiana is at ground zero.”
As the Gulf heats and storms intensify, the scientists studying it warn their work is losing funding.
The changes are no longer projections.
They are happening in real time, and they compound.
Just this month, the Gulf hit a record high temperature for early July, driven by a recent heat wave.
As water warms, it expands, speeding sea level rise along the Louisiana coast that is already climbing six times faster than the global average, largely due to land subsidence.
The heat is also spreading deeper as the climate gets hotter, with temperatures rising even at the very bottom of the Gulf.
Communities like Ironton may bear the brunt of the extremes.
But as the Gulf heats and seas rise, no communities along the coast will be spared the impacts of a changing climate.
“They are getting worse,” she said of the storms.
“We are ducks in the water.
Every time June comes around, we wonder: Will we have to run again?”
While Martin’s gliders largely measure the temperature of the Gulf at its surface, something equally concerning is happening at its depths.
Scientists have long known that the oceans absorb most of the excess heat that’s getting trapped in the atmosphere due to human-caused emissions, but they once thought that warming was largely confined to the ocean’s top layer.
But when a team of researchers tethered deep-sea thermometers to the ocean floor in the western Gulf, they measured an alarming trend: Even at the bottom — at a depth of more than 11,000 feet — it is getting warmer, at a rate of about 0.15 degrees Fahrenheit per half-century.
The creatures that live at the bottom of the Gulf — the deep-sea corals and strange fishes — are precisely tuned animals, adapted to live in a high-pressure, low-temperature environment.
Small changes there ripple.
Many of those creatures form the basis of the food chain fueling the Gulf’s mega-fisheries that power the state’s coastal economy.
Corals at the bottom of the ocean are particularly vulnerable to temperature changes.
Even a small rise can stress corals, causing them to expel the symbiotic algae that lives inside them — giving them their color and most of their nutrients — in a process called “coral bleaching.”
These corals are crucial nurseries for dozens of critical species that coastal communities rely on.
“I was on a coral reef about 500 meters down and we saw groupers down there.
We saw barrel fish.
We saw alfonsino.
We saw spot prawns,” said Erik Cordes, a biologist at Temple University who studies corals, often using remotely operated submarines.
“These are all species that are fished in the Gulf of Mexico, that spend good parts of their lives way down deep on these coral reefs.”
What happens at depth doesn’t just affect the creatures that live near the seafloor.
As hurricanes tear over the Gulf’s balmy waters, they draw heat from its surface.
If those waters are hot enough, storms become rapidly supercharged — as Hurricane Ida did before it slammed into Ironton.
In previous decades, once that heat from the surface of the Gulf was sucked up by the storm, which churns the waters like a blender as it passes over, the cooler waters below tended to slow a hurricane down.
Now, even those deeper waters are warmer than they used to be.
“A hurricane can blow itself out by causing this deeper water to well up,” said Boesch.
But if the Gulf’s deep waters are warm, “it just wells up more heat and intensifies.”
The heat trapped in the Gulf’s depths doesn't stay there.
It is connected to a massive system of global ocean currents that help regulate the planet’s climate.
A monster current flows into the Gulf between the Yucatán Peninsula and Cuba, plodding north toward Louisiana before doubling back on itself and flowing out through the Florida Straits.
That stream, called the Loop Current, is a key component of the global system of water flows that forms, as Texas A&M professor of oceanography Steven DiMarco put it, “the air-conditioning of the planet,” moving heat, through water, between the equator and the poles.
“Will that change?”
DiMarco asks.
The question arises because, when the Loop Current flows out through the Florida Straits, it joins the Gulf Stream, the flow of warm water that brings heat from the tropics up toward northern Europe.
Those currents, taken together, are part of what scientists call the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation — a system of global ocean currents that plays a significant role in regulating the world’s climate.
All of those currents may be slowing.
Scientists are now debating the possibility that the system of currents — the flows of water that have circled the globe for millennia — could collapse entirely due to climate change.
“The likelihood of that happening is still debated,” said Matthieu Le Hénaff, a NOAA oceanographer.
“There is no certainty of a collapse.
Some models show it.
It's highly discussed.”
If it were to collapse, the climate system would be thrown out of whack.
Parts of Europe could fluctuate between colder winters and hotter summers.
Monsoons would be disrupted.
Wildfire risk could increase.
Sea level rise would accelerate — in the Gulf and globally — and agricultural systems could be upturned.
“Just because the Gulf is partially enclosed doesn't mean we’re not connected to everything else,” Martin said.
While these shifting currents threaten to rewrite the global climate, the sheer volume of this warming is already threatening to redraw the map of the Gulf.
The contours of the Gulf 125,000 years ago may portend what is to come.
That was the last time global temperatures were comparable to what they are now, and the Gulf lapped against an ancient ridge that traverses the state from Mississippi to Texas, north of Lake Pontchartrain and Lake Maurepas.
The line is roughly where wetlands and loose mud give way to pine forests and denser soil.
Generations into the future, the Gulf may eventually return there, a recent paper from researchers at Tulane University argued, though scientists and local leaders say there are options to adapt and stave off that prospect.
In the meantime, extreme events will — and have already — become more frequent.
Dangendorf led a study, published in June, that found that globally since 1900, coastal extreme sea levels that used to happen once a century are occurring 12 times as often, with human-driven warming quadrupling their likelihood.
“Ida was a storm that came up fast,” Declouet said recently as he sat under his rehabbed house.
“And it was one of these things where they couldn't decide whether it was going to be a Category 3, 4 or 5.
They couldn't decide.”
Ida’s supercharged winds were not a fluke.
The sudden force of the 2021 storm signaled much more.
“This is a dramatic wake-up call,” said Donald Boesch, a professor of marine science at the University of Maryland who previously served as the first director of the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium.
“These are not theoretical concepts that people keep talking about.
Your insurance increases, you have water damage, you have damage to your house,” said Sönke Dangendorf, a Tulane scientist considered one of the world’s preeminent experts on sea levels.
“These are real-world experiences.”
Since 1970, the Gulf’s surface has warmed twice as quickly as the combined average of the rest of the world’s oceans, federal data shows, climbing nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit.
That might not seem like much, but it is already having wide-ranging effects.
Email Alex Lubben at alex.lubben@theadvocate.com and follow him on Twitter @alexlubben.
His work is supported with a grant from the Walton Family Foundation, administered by the Baton Rouge Area Foundation.
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