SURFACE WARMING CONCERNS IN THE INTERTIDAL COASTAL AREA OF ARABIAN GULF AND HOW RESILIENT THE LIVING COMMUNITIES WITHIN

One of the numerous difficulties plaguing the transitional-to-marine domain across the world, including the Arabian Gulf, is climate change, notably global warming. In the Gulf region, no significant study has thoroughly investigated the aforementioned issues, and instead our predictions frequently rely upon future climate predictions. It is therefore debatable how the living benthic community's will survive an uncertain future.

To further our current understanding, we are conducting fieldwork at a few chosen locations in the Arabian Gulf region, and are using remote sensing to monitor the surface temperature conditions. Based on the surface temperatures from a remote sensing approach with the earliest possible extracted data to the newest viable (2023), the average temperature is relatively variable, with lower-upper limit ranging between 18±1°C and 35±1°C for the sea surface and 15±1°C and 45±1°C for the land surface, representing the coldest winter and hottest summer records. In contrast, our field data collection records sea surface temperatures above 40°C and land surface temperatures indicated by substrate temperatures of up to 55°C for sandy substrate and above 60°C for muddy intertidal areas. Numerous areas across the western portion of the Arabian Gulf, including Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, are referred to as potential "kill zones" where the living communities, including intertidal mollusks, crustaceans, annelids, and foraminifera, are on the verge of extermination due to the rising temperatures during the summer months. By conducting thermal limit experiments, we were also able to demonstrate that living communities are generally resilient to temperature constraints during winter, but summer temperatures in the intertidal zones currently exceed the lethal limits of marine benthic organisms.

More in-situ temperature monitoring and experimental work is required to examine how acute the actual condition is throughout the Arabian Gulf region, and how resilient other living benthic communities are to rising temperatures observed in our records. Our current findings indicate that, given that the actual records of temperature in the Arabian Gulf are already exceeding the values proposed in climate models, and the living benthic communities are already dead or dying in some shallow-water habitats.