Spanish Mediterranean registered record hottest temperature this summer

OVIEDO, Spain

This summer produced the hottest water on record in Spain’s Mediterranean Sea, according to data released by Spain’s public port organization on Monday.

A buoy off the west coast of the Spanish island of Mallorca registered water temperatures of 31.36 degrees Celsius (88.88 degrees Fahrenheit), shattering the all-time record for sea temperature in Spain.

The water around the buoy first broke the Spanish record on Aug. 11, but saw even higher temperatures on Aug. 15.

All buoys that track the temperatures of Spain’s seas are at least 100 meters (238 feet) deep.

The waters around the Mediterranean areas of Valencia, Cabo de Gata, Cabo de Palos, Ceuta and Tarragona also smashed local heat records this summer.

Ceuta, a Spanish enclave in North Africa, saw temperatures a full 2 degrees Celsius above the previous maximum.

One of the direct consequences of this summer’s scorching seas was the mass death of Mediterranean mussels. In the Delta del Ebro region in Catalonia, an estimated 150 tons of commercial mussels and 1,000 tons of young stock were wiped out by the hot waters.

“The Mediterranean is boiling,” Carlo Buontempo, head of the Copernicus climate change program, told Spanish daily El Pais. “And it is one of the ingredients for even more extreme weather events like very heavy precipitation.”

He said the warming Mediterranean, as well as other oceans, is a serious consequence of climate change.

Last week, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the harmful impacts of climate change are taking the world into “unchartered territories of destruction,” after the World Meteorological Organization report showed that carbon emissions increased to record highs in 2021.

The marine heat wave corresponded with Spain’s and Europe’s hottest summer on record, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service and Spanish meteorological service AEMET.

While Spain’s Atlantic waters did not break absolute records this summer, several areas saw their hottest ever water temperatures for the month of July.