Thu, Apr 14, 2016 from NYTimes, via DesdemonaDespair: The Looming 'Planetary Crisis': Mass Bleaching of the Coral Reefs The damage off Kiritimati is part of a mass bleaching of coral reefs around the world, only the third on record and possibly the worst ever. Scientists believe that heat stress from multiple weather events including the latest, severe El Niño, compounded by climate change, has threatened more than a third of Earth's coral reefs. Many may not recover.
Coral reefs are the crucial incubators of the ocean's ecosystem, providing food and shelter to a quarter of all marine species, and they support fish stocks that feed more than one billion people. They are made up of millions of tiny animals, called polyps, that form symbiotic relationships with algae, which in turn capture sunlight and carbon dioxide to make sugars that feed the polyps.
An estimated 30 million small-scale fishermen and women depend on reefs for their livelihoods, more than one million in the Philippines alone. In Indonesia, fish supported by the reefs provide the primary source of protein.
"This is a huge, looming planetary crisis, and we are sticking our heads in the sand about it," said Justin Marshall, the director of CoralWatch at Australia's University of Queensland....
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Surely we can devise a few million floating solar-powered water coolers to stabilize those reefs!
Wed, Mar 23, 2016 from New York Magazine: New Paper Suggests Catastrophic Climate Shifts May Be Decades Away Using computer models, evidence from ancient episodes of climate change, and modern observations, Hansen and his team arrived at one essential conclusion: The melting of the Greenland and Antarctica ice sheets will set off a vicious cycle that dramatically accelerates the pace of climate change. The key concept here is ocean "stratification," a process by which cold, fresh meltwater rises to the ocean surface while warmer salt water is pushed beneath. (The Washington Post notes that an "anomalously cold 'blob' of ocean water" has been detected off the southern coast of Greenland.) That warmer salt water would eventually reach the base of the ice sheets, melting them from below, thus spurring more stratification, which would then spur more melting, which would then spur more stratification, which would spur more warming, until our grandchildren are all swallowed by the sea.
But that's not all! Hansen's paper also projects that the influx of cold meltwater in the North Atlantic region, combined with warmer equatorial waters, would drive midlatitude cyclones so strong, the waves would be capable of thrusting gigantic boulders ashore. ...
All Systems Are Pointing. Any Solutions Are Prerequisites. Atlantic Seaboard Aquatically Plundered. Awkward Statements Acronyming Panic: A.S.A.P.!
Sun, Jan 24, 2016 from Desmog Canada: "The Blob" Disrupts What We Think We Know About Climate Change, Oceans Scientist Says When the abnormally warm patch of water first appeared in 2013, fascinated scientists watched disrupted weather patterns, from drought in California to almost snowless winters in Alaska and record cold winters in the northeast.
The anomalously warm water, with temperatures three degrees Centigrade above normal, was nicknamed The Blob by U.S climatologist Nick Bond. It stretched over one million square kilometres of the Gulf of Alaska -- more than the surface area of B.C. and Alberta combined -- stretching down 100-metres into the ocean.
And, over the next two years that patch of water radically affected marine life from herring to whales.
Without the welling-up of cold, nutrient-rich water, there was a dearth of krill, zooplankton and copepods that feed herring, salmon and other species.
"The fish out there are malnourished, the whole ecosystem is malnourished," said Richard Dewey, associate director for science with Ocean Networks Canada, speaking at Shaw Ocean Discovery Centre in Sidney on Thursday....
It could be an indication of what climate change will look like, with large-scale shifts in weather patterns, said Dewey, pointing out that The Blob was not anticipated by climatologists because it did not fit into existing climate models.
"Climate change may look like a whole new model we haven't seen before," Dewey said. ...
It might be time for Godzilla to smash industrial civilization.
Mon, Aug 17, 2015 from Gail at Wit: Dispatch from the Endocene, #9 Following is the transcript from my segment on Extinction Radio which airs Sunday, August 16 ...
The Dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico is larger this summer than it has ever been, about the size of Connecticut and Rhode Island combined.... [Elsewhere,] "The toxic algae blooms in the Pacific Ocean stretching from southern California to Alaska -- already the largest ever recorded -- appear to have reached as far as the Aleutian Islands, scientists say. "The anecdotal evidence suggests we're having a major event," said Bruce Wright...
"Insecticides that are sprayed in orchards and fields across North America may be more toxic to spiders than scientists previously believed"...
"[T]he recent determination that cancer is almost entirely the result of exposure to various modern toxins"...
"Every year over the last decade and a half, the U.S. Geological Survey has descended on Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks in California to give 17,000 trees a physical. But in a growing number of cases, what's starting off as a check-up is turning into an autopsy."...
"I used to call them 'the immortals,' because they just never seemed to die," he says. "In the fourth year of drought, they've started dying by the bucket-loads. So they're no longer the immortals." ...
If all this were really happening, I'd be hearing about it on the news. Because that's what they're giving us, right? News? What's really happening?
Mon, Aug 10, 2015 from Dahr Jamail, via TruthOut: The New Climate "Normal": Abrupt Sea Level Rise and Predictions of Civilization Collapse ... As if that's not enough, Hansen's study comes on the heels of another study published in Science, which shows that global sea levels could rise by at least 20 feet, even if governments manage to keep global temperature increases to within the agreed upon "safe" limit of 2 degrees Celsius.... Disconcertingly, another new "normal" this month comes in the form of huge plumes of wildfire smoke over the Arctic. At the time of this writing, well over 12 million acres of forest and tundra in Canada and Alaska have burned in wildfires, and the smoke covering the Arctic sea ice is yet another anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD) amplifying feedback loop that will accelerate melting there. The additional smoke further warms the atmosphere that quickens the melting of the Arctic ice pack....
"The results show that based on plausible climate trends, and a total failure to change course, the global food supply system would face catastrophic losses, and an unprecedented epidemic of food riots," the Institute's director, Dr. Aled Jones, told Insurge Intelligence. "In this scenario, global society essentially collapses as food production falls permanently short of consumption."... ...
Well, as long as the American Way of Life™ isn't threatened!
Sun, Jul 5, 2015 from Science, via ScienceDaily: The oceans can't take any more: Fundamental change in oceans predicted Our oceans need an immediate and substantial reduction of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. If that doesn't happen, we could see far-reaching and largely irreversible impacts on marine ecosystems, which would especially be felt in developing countries. That's the conclusion of a new review study published today in the journal Science. In the study, the research team from the Ocean 2015 initiative assesses the latest findings on the risks that climate change poses for our oceans, and demonstrates how fundamentally marine ecosystems are likely to change if human beings continue to produce just as much greenhouse gases as before....
"To date, the oceans have essentially been the planet's refrigerator and carbon dioxide storage locker. For instance, since the 1970s they've absorbed roughly 93 percent of the additional heat produced by the greenhouse effect, greatly helping to slow the warming of our planet," explains Prof Hans-Otto Pörtner, co-author of the new Ocean 2015 study....
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Sat, Jun 27, 2015 from Vice: Sea Stars in Death Match With Themselves But Gong quickly understood that this was different. Her [sea] stars weren't merely shedding their arms. They were tearing them off. They were tearing them off the way a man, lacking access to a sharp tool, might tear off one of his own arms: by using one arm to wrench the other out of its socket. "They twisted their arms together," Gong said, "and they'd pull and pull and pull, until one of them came off. Then the arm walks away because it doesn't know that it's dead. It was horrific. They weren't just dying. They were tearing themselves to pieces." ... Nobody knew exactly what to call it. Was it a die-off? A plague? A population crash? An extinction event? Scientists began referring to it as "the Wasting." ...
"It was creepy," said Raimondi, using a term one doesn't typically hear from biologists. The Wasting has that effect. It makes scientists, who tend to choose their words with severe caution, speak like teenagers. In conversations they kept using words like "shock," "horror," and "nightmare." ...
Raimondi has recently received reports of mass wasting among sea urchin populations. He does not know whether the same densovirus is responsible, but it looks familiar. "It's a lot like the early days for sea stars," he told me. ...
Bad enough we're losing the birds and bats and bees. We're going to lose the stars, too?
Tue, May 19, 2015 from Climate Central: Heat is Piling Up in the Depths of the Indian Ocean The world's oceans are playing a game of hot potato with the excess heat trapped by greenhouse gas emissions. Scientists have zeroed in on the tropical Pacific as a major player in taking up that heat. But while it might have held that heat for a bit, new research shows that the Pacific has passed the potato to the Indian Ocean, which has seen an unprecedented rise in heat content over the past decade. ...
Rise up, couch potatoes; this is no small potatoes that oceans are passing this hot potato around.
Mon, May 18, 2015 from PhysOrg: Ocean currents disturb methane-eating bacteria Offshore the Svalbard archipelago, methane gas is seeping out of the seabed at the depths of several hundred meters. These cold seeps are a home to communities of microorganisms that survive in a chemosynthetic environment - where the fuel for life is not the sun, but the carbon rich greenhouse gas....
There is a large, and relatively poorly understood, community of methane-consuming bacteria in this environment. They gorge on the gas, control its concentration in the ocean, and stop it from reaching the ocean surface and released into the atmosphere....
"We were able to show that strength and variability of ocean currents control the prevalence of methanotrophic bacteria", says Lea Steinle from University of Basel and the lead author of the study, "therefore, large bacteria populations cannot develop in a strong current, which consequently leads to less methane consumption."
...
Bubble, bubble, roil and trouble, microbes fail and methanes double.
Wed, May 13, 2015 from ThinkProgress: Sea Level Rise Is Happening Faster Than Anyone Thought "We see acceleration, and what I find striking about that is the fact that it's consistent with the projections of sea level rise published by the IPCC," Watson told the Guardian. "Sea level rise is getting faster. We know it's been getting faster over the last two decades than its been over the 20th century and its getting faster again."
Because sea levels can naturally fluctuate as water is exchanged between land and sea, Watson notes that the rate of increase is too small to be statistically significant -- though he told the Washington Post that it's clear that sea levels are now rising at roughly double the rate observed in the 20th century, something that will have potentially huge ramifications for coastal areas across the world. ...
Thu, Apr 2, 2015 from Yale360: How Long Can Oceans Continue To Absorb Earth's Excess Heat? The ocean has been heating at a rate of around 0.5 to 1 watt of energy per square meter over the past decade, amassing more than 2 X 1023 joules of energy -- the equivalent of roughly five Hiroshima bombs exploding every second -- since 1990. Vast and slow to change temperature, the oceans have a huge capacity to sequester heat, especially the deep ocean, which is playing an increasingly large uptake and storage role.
That is a major reason the planet's surface temperatures have risen less than expected in the past dozen or so years, given the large greenhouse gas hike during the same period, said Kevin Trenberth, senior scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research...
But scientists say that when the cycle eventually swings back to its positive, warm phase, which history suggests could occur within a decade, the winds will wind down, the pumping will let up, and buried heat will rise back into the atmosphere.
"There's a hint this might already be starting to happen," said Matthew England, an ocean sciences professor at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia....
Scientists are also learning that the ocean has gained more heat, and at greater depth, than they had realized. That means the entire climate is even more out-of-whack than is evident today....
The long-term heat gain in the top 700 meters (.43 miles) of the world’s oceans has likely been underestimated by as much as half, according to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories research scientist Paul Durack. ...
Our ocean heat has grown / Vaster than empires / and more slow
Fri, Mar 20, 2015 from Washington Post: The melting of Antarctica was already really bad. It just got worse. A hundred years from now, humans may remember 2014 as the year that we first learned that we may have irreversibly destabilized the great ice sheet of West Antarctica, and thus set in motion more than 10 feet of sea level rise.
Meanwhile, 2015 could be the year of the double whammy -- when we learned the same about one gigantic glacier of East Antarctica, which could set in motion roughly the same amount all over again. Northern Hemisphere residents and Americans in particular should take note -- when the bottom of the world loses vast amounts of ice, those of us living closer to its top get more sea level rise than the rest of the planet, thanks to the law of gravity. ...
It's clear we need to develop "Mr. Freeze" mutant abilities. Monsanto, are you listening?
Wed, Mar 11, 2015 from The Independent: March: Arctic sea ice near its all-time winter low and could break previous record Sea ice in the Arctic is near its all-time minimum for the end of winter and could break the previous record within the next two weeks if it fails to grow, according to the latest satellite data.
The area of the Arctic covered by floating sea ice is already the lowest for this time of year, highlighting the long-term warming trend experienced by the region in both winter and summer months.
Sea ice expands and contracts with the seasons but satellite data collected since the 1970s shows that it is retreating further and further during the summer months compared to 20 or 30 years ago.
Sea ice in summer has shrunk by 30 per cent on average over the past 30 years while average temperatures in the Arctic have risen by about 4C - more than 3C warmer than the global average. ...
If only I'd shorted Arctic futures -- I'd be set for life.
Thu, Nov 13, 2014 from Guardian: New study shows warm waters are melting Antarctica from below Just this week, a new study has appeared which describes a clever method for measuring the flows of ocean currents and their impacts on ice shelves. This study has identified a major mechanism for melting ice in the Southern Hemisphere.
The paper, co-authored by Andrew Thompson, Karen Heywood, and colleagues is very novel. The scientists used sea gliders to identify water flows that bring warm waters to the base of ice shelves in Antarctica. As I've written before, ocean currents are complex; you cannot neglect their impact on the Earth's climate....
The data showed that eddy-transport and surface-wind-caused motion are comparable in their contribution to water circulation. They showed however, that the eddy motion is largely confined to the warm intermediate water layers. The penetration of the warm waters to the ice shelves is believed to be responsible for the dramatic ice loss that has been observed in the Antarctic.
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It's the reach of Satan from the depths of Hell! Or maybe just another domino.
Tue, Oct 7, 2014 from Christian Science Monitor: Global warming's effect on oceans is greater than realized, researchers say The world's upper oceans may have stored far more heat from the warming climate than previously thought, according to a new study that purports to provide the first rough estimate of the amount of heat researchers have missed in their attempts to measure changes on the oceans' heat content.
If the results hold up to additional scrutiny, they suggest that global warming's effect on upper ocean temperatures between 1970 and 2004 has been underestimated by 24 to 58 percent, largely the result of sparse long-term measurements in the southern oceans... Getting ocean heating right is important for estimating the amount of sea-level rise caused by the expansion of seawater as it warms and the amount attributed to melting of land-based glaciers and ice sheets, researchers say. ...
Fri, Aug 22, 2014 from London Guardian: Global warming slowdown answer lies in depths of Atlantic, study finds The key to the slowdown in global warming in recent years could lie in the depths of the Atlantic and Southern Oceans where excess heat is being stored - not the Pacific Ocean as has previously been suggested, according to new research.
But the finding suggests that a naturally occurring ocean cycle burying the heat will flip in around 15 years' time, causing global temperature rises to accelerate again. ...
Tue, Aug 19, 2014 from Ecowatch: July Ocean Temperature Hits Record High--Again Last month, Earth's ocean surfaces tied the previous record for the hottest July during the 130 years the U.S. government has been compiling data. The National Climatic Data Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported that the average temperature was 62.56 degrees Fahrenheit, 1.06 degrees above the 20th-century average. The ocean surfaces also reached that temperature in July 2009. It's the third straight month this year that ocean surface temperatures set a record. ...
Mon, Aug 18, 2014 from TED: Beautiful and Sad GIFs that Show what's Happening to the Ocean Scientist Sylvia Earle (TED Talk: My wish: Protect our oceans) has spent the past five decades exploring the seas. During that time, she's witnessed a steep decline in ocean wildlife numbers -- and a sharp incline in the number of ocean deadzones and oil drilling sites. An original documentary about Earle's life and work premieres today on Netflix.... Below, four ocean infographic then-and-now-gifs from the film.
What happened to the coral reefs? -- What happened to tuna, sharks, and cod? -- The number of ocean deadzones then and now -- The number of Gulf Coast oil drilling sites then and now... ...
"Then" is as much "now" as "now" was "then," if any future is presaged by a past. That means that, ergo, it's clear there is no need to complicate matters with comparisons. No need to pay attention to change, or to the present. Carry on.
Mon, Aug 4, 2014 from University of New South Wales: Atlantic warming turbocharges Pacific trade winds Rapid warming of the Atlantic Ocean, likely caused by global warming, has turbocharged Pacific Equatorial trade winds. This has caused eastern tropical Pacific cooling, amplified the Californian drought, accelerated sea level rise three times faster than the global average in the Western Pacific and has slowed the rise of global average surface temperatures since 2001.... While active, the stronger Equatorial trade winds have caused far greater overturning of ocean water in the West Pacific, pushing more atmospheric heat into the ocean... This increased overturning appears to explain much of the recent slowdown in the rise of global average surface temperatures.
Importantly, the researchers don't expect the current pressure difference between the two ocean basins to last. When it does end, they expect to see some rapid changes, including a sudden acceleration of global average surface temperatures.
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A tale of two oceans ... and one world on the precipice of climate chaos.
Sun, Aug 3, 2014 from US Naval War College, via YouTube: Jeremy Jackson: Ocean Apocalypse, a lecture at the US Naval War College In an hour-plus lecture filled with trenchant analysis of current data, and astounding historical comparisons between 1900 and now, Jackson (aka "the James Hansen for the Ocean") overviews how badly, badly we've been treating the oceans -- and how unlikely it is that we can recover them, prior to the consequent collapse of civilization. ...
Sun, Jul 27, 2014 from Telegraph (UK): Sea temperature off Plymouth hotter than California Ocean temperatures have a soared to a seven-year high off southwest Britain - making our seas as hot as California.
Marine scientists say the water has reached 20.4C (68.7F) off Start Bay, Devon, and 20.1C (68.2F) off Perranporth, Cornwall.
That is even warmer than readings taken from Santa Monica beach in Los Angeles, where its currently lagging behind at 19.4C (66.9F) and only 8C short of the sea temperature in Bali.
Temperatures off the British coast are also rising by almost 4C a month - twice as fast as normal....
"Increasing sea temperatures will change the community structure and certain species will be better adpated to the warmer temperatures. That's both the microscopic plants, the phytoplankton and the large plants, the kelp.
"Jellyfish tend to like warm waters so there might be an increase in the jellyfish population although bathers shouldn;t be unduly concerned."
Meanwhile hot temperatures blowing in from Europe are bringing with it pollutants and these are reacting with sunlight to produce a soup of chemical smog which endangers health. ...
Thu, Jun 19, 2014 from Grist: Everything you need to know about El Niño -- and more While European scientists now say there is a 90 percent chance of an El Niño forming this year (if it hasn't indeed formed already), what, exactly, an El Niño will do depends a lot on its particular strength....
But whether the boy is coming this year or not, we haven't seen the last of him. Scientists believe that the so-called "global warming pause" we've seen in the past 16 years is the result of the Pacific Ocean spewing out so much of its heat during the El Niño of 1997-'98. Since then, it has had more of an appetite to suck atmospheric heat back in -- and because the trade winds haven't slackened much since then, the Pacific has held on to all that warmth. So, when a big El Niño does form again, us landlubbers are going to heat up ... really fast.
On the positive side, that could help convince more people that this whole climate change thing is real. And a little rain would be welcome in drought-stricken California. But there will be many, many downsides -- and not just especially bad traffic jams. ...
I'll see your El Nino, and raise you a derecho and a deluge.
Wed, Jun 11, 2014 from University of Edinburgh, via ScienceDaily: Warming climates intensify greenhouse gas given out by oceans Fresh insight into how the oceans can affect CO2 levels in the atmosphere shows that rising temperatures can indirectly increase the amount of the greenhouse gas emitted by the oceans.
Scientists studied a 26,000-year-old sediment core taken from the Gulf of California to find out how the ocean's ability to take up atmospheric CO2 has changed over time.
They tracked the abundance of the key elements silicon and iron in the fossils of tiny marine organisms, known as plankton, in the sediment core. Plankton absorb CO2 from the atmosphere at the ocean surface, and can lock away vast quantities of carbon....
Researchers found that those periods when silicon was least abundant in ocean waters corresponded with relatively warm climates, low levels of atmospheric iron, and reduced CO2 uptake by the oceans' plankton. Scientists had suspected that iron might have a role in enabling plankton to absorb CO2. However, this latest study shows that a lack of iron at the ocean surface can limit the effect of other key elements in helping plankton take up carbon. ...
I wonder if ocean acidity's effect on plankton might also be a factor?
Wed, May 7, 2014 from Science, via CBS News (2006): Salt-Water Fish Extinction Seen By 2048 The apocalypse has a new date: 2048.
That's when the world's oceans will be empty of fish, predicts an international team of ecologists and economists. The cause: the disappearance of species due to overfishing, pollution, habitat loss, and climate change.
The study by Boris Worm, PhD, of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, -- with colleagues in the U.K., U.S., Sweden, and Panama -- was an effort to understand what this loss of ocean species might mean to the world.
The researchers analyzed several different kinds of data. Even to these ecology-minded scientists, the results were an unpleasant surprise.
"I was shocked and disturbed by how consistent these trends are -- beyond anything we suspected," Worm says in a news release.
"This isn't predicted to happen. This is happening now," study researcher Nicola Beaumont, PhD, of the Plymouth Marine Laboratory, U.K., says in a news release.
"If biodiversity continues to decline, the marine environment will not be able to sustain our way of life. Indeed, it may not be able to sustain our lives at all," Beaumont adds. ...
Sat, Mar 22, 2014 from University of Pennsylvania: Deep ocean current may slow due to climate change Far beneath the surface of the ocean, deep currents act as conveyer belts, channeling heat, carbon, oxygen and nutrients around the globe. A new study by the University of Pennsylvania's Irina Marinov and Raffaele Bernardello and colleagues from McGill University has found that recent climate change may be acting to slow down one of these conveyer belts, with potentially serious consequences for the future of the planet's climate. "Our observations are showing us that there is less formation of these deep waters near Antarctica," Marinov said. "This is worrisome because, if this is the case, we're likely going to see less uptake of human produced, or anthropogenic, heat and carbon dioxide by the ocean, making this a positive feedback loop for climate change."...The ocean contains about 50 times more carbon than the atmosphere, making it a crucial but sometimes overlooked player in climate change regulation. ...
If only humans could adopt a slow motion lifestyle.
You're still reading! Good for you!
You really should read our short, funny, frightening book FREE online (or buy a print copy): Humoring the Horror of the Converging Emergencies!
We've been quipping this stuff for more than 30 months! Every day!
Which might explain why we don't get invited to parties anymore.
Mon, Feb 10, 2014 from University of New South Wales: Pacific trade winds stall global surface warming ... for now Heat stored in the western Pacific Ocean caused by an unprecedented strengthening of the equatorial trade winds appears to be largely responsible for the hiatus in surface warming observed over the past 13 years. The strongest trade winds have driven more of the heat from global warming into the oceans; but when those winds slow, that heat will rapidly return to the atmosphere causing an abrupt rise in global average temperatures, scientists say.
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Tue, Jan 28, 2014 from Guardian: Warmer seas 'are making fish smaller' A decline in the size of some species of fish in the North Sea could be due to a rise in water temperatures, according to research.
Scientists found that the maximum length of haddock, whiting, herring, Norway pout, plaice and sole decreased by as much as 29 percent over a 38-year period when temperatures in the North Sea increased by between 1C and 2C.
The availability of food and an increase in fishing could also be factors in the reduction in length but the "synchronised" fall in size across a range of species led the fisheries scientists at the University of Aberdeen to identify climate change, and particularly higher water temperatures, as a common theme....
Dr Baudron added: "The increase in temperature of the North Sea is actually quite subtle - approximately 2C - yet this appears to be having a detectable impact on growth rates of fish. ...
I know we need something to replace the vanishing phytoplankton, but isn't this the wrong way to go about it?
Sun, Jan 5, 2014 from Yale360: Atlantic Ocean Zooplankton Are Now Reproducing in Arctic Waters For the first time, scientists have discovered species of Atlantic Ocean zooplankton reproducing in Arctic waters. German researchers say the discovery indicates a possible shift in the Arctic zooplankton community as the region warms, one that could be detrimental to Arctic birds, fish, and marine mammals.... The researchers found fertile females as well as individuals at all stages of development, showing that the Atlantic species is reproducing in the frigid waters. The one-centimeter amphipods are smaller than respective Arctic species, meaning that the spread of the Atlantic crustaceans northward could reduce the volume of food available to Arctic predators. ...
The Arctic ecosystem is just not stepping up to the new requirements.
Mon, Dec 16, 2013 from Ohio State University: East Antarctica Is Sliding Sideways: Ice Loss On West Antarctica Affecting Mantle Flow Below It's official: East Antarctica is pushing West Antarctica around. Now that West Antarctica is losing weight--that is, billions of tons of ice per year--its softer mantle rock is being nudged westward by the harder mantle beneath East Antarctica.
The discovery comes from researchers led by The Ohio State University, who have recorded GPS measurements that show West Antarctic bedrock is being pushed sideways at rates up to about twelve millimeters--about half an inch--per year. This movement is important for understanding current ice loss on the continent, and predicting future ice loss. ...
Mon, Dec 9, 2013 from ThinkProgress: The 2014 Shrimp Season In The Gulf Of Maine Has Been Canceled They're small and sweet, beloved by locals and tourists alike, and will soon be indefinitely unavailable. The Northern shrimp population in the Gulf of Maine has officially collapsed and a moratorium on shrimping is being recommended for the 2014 season. Restaurants in Maine are rushing to get their hands on whatever is left over from last year's catch....
"I think everyone was startled by what we saw in 2012, and there was a lot of pressure to close down the fishery for the 2013 season," said John Annala, Chief Scientific Officer at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute. "The survey this summer found just 20 percent of the 2012 record low, so it has fallen off incredibly sharply."
Perhaps most worrying is the fact that juvenile shrimp have not been picked up in a survey since 2010. Northern shrimp live about five years, so the lack of younger shrimp for three years straight may mean empty nets for years to come. ...
Those juvenile-delinquent shrimp are playing hookey!
Tue, Dec 3, 2013 from National Research Council: Abrupt Impacts of Climate Change: Anticipating Surprises Although there is still much to learn about abrupt climate change and abrupt climate impacts, to willfully ignore the threat of abrupt change could lead to more costs, loss of life, suffering, and environmental degradation. The time is here to be serious about the threat of tipping points so as to better anticipate and prepare ourselves for the inevitable surprises. ...
Uh-oh: this language is how the National Research Council expresses panic.
Wed, Nov 27, 2013 from ARC Centre of Excellence in Coral Reef Studies : Reef Fish Find It's Too Hot to Swim We all know the feeling, it's a hot summer afternoon and you have no appetite and don't want to do anything apart from lay on the couch. A team of researchers from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University has shown that ocean warming may make some large reef fish feel the same way....
Dr Johansen said that research aimed at understanding the impact of global warming on the commercially important fish species, coral trout, revealed that increasing ocean temperatures may cause large fish to become lethargic, spending more time resting on the bottom and less time swimming in search for food or reproductive opportunities. ...
Tue, Nov 26, 2013 from University of Alaska Fairbanks, via EurekAlert: Study: Arctic seafloor methane releases double previous estimates The seafloor off the coast of Northern Siberia is releasing more than twice the amount of methane as previously estimated, according to new research results published in the Nov. 24 edition of the journal Nature Geoscience.
The East Siberian Arctic Shelf is venting at least 17 teragrams of the methane into the atmosphere each year. A teragram is equal to 1 million tons.
"It is now on par with the methane being released from the arctic tundra, which is considered to be one of the major sources of methane in the Northern Hemisphere," said Natalia Shakhova, one of the paper's lead authors and a scientist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. "Increased methane releases in this area are a possible new climate-change-driven factor that will strengthen over time."... ...
Tue, Nov 19, 2013 from AP, via WHTI: Zooplankton decline reported in North Atlantic The microscopic creatures that make up a critical link in the ocean food chain declined dramatically the first half of this year in the North Atlantic as ocean temperatures remained among the warmest on record, federal scientists say.
Springtime plankton blooms off the coast of northern New England were well below average this year, leading to the lowest levels ever seen for the tiny organisms that are essential to maintaining balance in the ocean food chain, said Kevin Friedland, a marine scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The absence of the normal surge of plankton in the spring is a concern because that's when cod and haddock and many other species produce offspring, Friedland said....
"The first six months of 2013 can be characterized by new extremes in the physical and biological environment," Friedland said from his office in Rhode Island.
The findings come after temperatures off the Northeast U.S. hit an all-time high in 2012.
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I had no idea the zooplankton-bone was connected to the cod-bone.
Mon, Nov 18, 2013 from Science Daily: Volcano Discovered Smoldering Under a Kilometer of Ice in West Antarctica: Heat May Increase Rate of Ice Loss ... In the meantime, automated-event-detection software was put to work to comb the data for anything unusual.
When it found two bursts of seismic events between January 2010 and March 2011, Wiens' PhD student Amanda Lough looked more closely to see what was rattling the continent's bones....
Will the eruptions punch through a kilometer or more of ice above it?
The scientists calculated that an enormous eruption, one that released a thousand times more energy than the typical eruption, would be necessary to breach the ice above the volcano.
On the other hand a subglacial eruption and the accompanying heat flow will melt a lot of ice. "The volcano will create millions of gallons of water beneath the ice -- many lakes full," says Wiens. This water will rush beneath the ice towards the sea and feed into the hydrological catchment of the MacAyeal Ice Stream, one of several major ice streams draining ice from Marie Byrd Land into the Ross Ice Shelf.
By lubricating the bedrock, it will speed the flow of the overlying ice, perhaps increasing the rate of ice-mass loss in West Antarctica.
"We weren't expecting to find anything like this," Wiens says. ...
If Antarctica belches a volcano, and nobody hears it, we can act as if that nothing happened at all.
Mon, Nov 11, 2013 from BBC: Ozone chemicals ban linked to global warming 'pause' A new study suggests that the ban on ozone depleting chemicals may have also impacted the rise in global temperatures.
CFC gases were responsible for a massive hole in the ozone layer but they also had a powerful greenhouse effect.
The authors link a ban on their use to a "pause" or slowdown in temperature increases since the mid 1990s.
The research is published in the journal Nature Geoscience....
"Our analysis suggests that the reduction in the emissions of ozone-depleting substances under the Montreal Protocol, as well as a reduction in methane emissions, contributed to the lower rate of warming since the 1990s," the authors write.
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Sun, Nov 10, 2013 from Foreign Affairs, via WitsEndNJ: The Devolution of the Seas: The Consequences of Oceanic Destruction Of all the threats looming over the planet today, one of the most alarming is the seemingly inexorable descent of the world's oceans into ecological perdition. Over the last several decades, human activities have so altered the basic chemistry of the seas that they are now experiencing evolution in reverse: a return to the barren primeval waters of hundreds of millions of years ago....
Over the last 50 years -- a mere blink in geologic time -- humanity has come perilously close to reversing the almost miraculous biological abundance of the deep. Pollution, overfishing, the destruction of habitats, and climate change are emptying the oceans and enabling the lowest forms of life to regain their dominance. The oceanographer Jeremy Jackson calls it 'the rise of slime': the transformation of once complex oceanic ecosystems featuring intricate food webs with large animals into simplistic systems dominated by microbes, jellyfish, and disease. In effect, humans are eliminating the lions and tigers of the seas to make room for the cockroaches and rats. ...
So, you environmentalists have become 'cockroaches and rats'-ists?
Sat, Nov 2, 2013 from The Earth Institute at Columbia University : Is Global Heating Hiding out in the Oceans? Parts of Pacific Warming 15 Times Faster Than in Past 10,000 Years A recent slowdown in global warming has led some skeptics to renew their claims that industrial carbon emissions are not causing a century-long rise in Earth's surface temperatures. But rather than letting humans off the hook, a new study in the leading journal Science adds support to the idea that the oceans are taking up some of the excess heat, at least for the moment. In a reconstruction of Pacific Ocean temperatures in the last 10,000 years, researchers have found that its middle depths have warmed 15 times faster in the last 60 years than they did during apparent natural warming cycles in the previous 10,000. ...
Tue, Oct 22, 2013 from http://www.theherald.com.au/story/1848433/the-ocean-is-broken/: The ocean is broken What was missing was the cries of the seabirds which, on all previous similar voyages, had surrounded the boat.
The birds were missing because the fish were missing.
Exactly 10 years before, when Newcastle yachtsman Ivan Macfadyen had sailed exactly the same course from Melbourne to Osaka, all he'd had to do to catch a fish from the ocean between Brisbane and Japan was throw out a baited line.
"There was not one of the 28 days on that portion of the trip when we didn't catch a good-sized fish to cook up and eat with some rice," Macfadyen recalled.
But this time, on that whole long leg of sea journey, the total catch was two.
No fish. No birds. Hardly a sign of life at all....
"I've done a lot of miles on the ocean in my life and I'm used to seeing turtles, dolphins, sharks and big flurries of feeding birds. But this time, for 3000 nautical miles there was nothing alive to be seen."
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Water, water, every where,/ Nor any drop to drink;/ Empty water, fishless scare,/ And never stop to think.
Sat, Oct 19, 2013 from ScienceDaily: Pacific Ocean Temperature Influences Tornado Activity in US University of Missouri researcher has found that the temperature of the Pacific Ocean could help scientists predict the type and location of tornado activity in the U.S.
Laurel McCoy, an atmospheric science graduate student at the MU School of Natural Resources, and Tony Lupo, professor and chair of atmospheric science in the College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources, surveyed 56,457 tornado-like events from 1950 to 2011. They found that when surface sea temperatures were warmer than average, the U.S. experienced 20.3 percent more tornados that were rated EF-2 to EF-5 on the Enhanced Fuijta (EF) scale. (The EF scale rates the strength of tornados based on the damage they cause. The scale has six category rankings from zero to five.)
McCoy and Lupo found that the tornados that occurred when surface sea temperatures were above average were usually located to the west and north of tornado alley, an area in the Midwestern part of the U.S. that experiences more tornados than any other area. McCoy also found that when sea surface temperatures were cooler, more tornadoes tracked from southern states, like Alabama, into Tennessee, Illinois and Indiana. ...
The Pacific is, after all, only three days' drive away from Hurricane Alley.
Thu, Oct 17, 2013 from Washington Post: Study links warmer water temperatures to greater levels of mercury in fish In a lab experiment, researchers adjusted temperatures in tanks, tainted the killifish's food with traces of methylmercury and watched as the fish stored high concentrations of the metal in their tissue.
In a field experiment in nearby salt pools, they observed as killifish in warmer pools ate their natural food and stored metal in even higher concentrations, like some toxic condiment for larger fish that would later prey on them.
The observation was part of a study showing how killifish at the bottom of the food chain will probably absorb higher levels of methylmercury in an era of global warming and pass it on to larger predator fish, such as the tuna stacked in shiny little cans in the cupboards of Americans and other people the world over.
"The implication is this could play out in larger fish . . . because their metabolic rate is also increasing," said Celia Chen, a professor at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire and one of six authors of the study. "Methylmercury isn't easily excreted, so it stays. It suggests that there will be higher methylmercury concentrations in the fish humans eat as well." ...
Finally! Something to solve the problem of overfishing!
Tue, Oct 15, 2013 from Sydney Daily Telegraph: Climate change moves Nemo current to south THE ocean current off the coast of Australia made famous in Finding Nemo has moved 350km south and is accelerating toward the pole, a draft international climate change report has found.
And with it so too are moving some species of shark and large fish such as Tuna, it has warned.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's second and yet to be released report into the impact of climate change has claimed average climate zones in Australia have already shifted 200km southward along the north east coast. ...
Mon, Oct 14, 2013 from Climate News Network: Ocean Deteriorating More Rapidly Than Thought Marine scientists say the state of the world's oceans is deteriorating more rapidly than anyone had realized, and is worse than that described in last month's U.N. climate report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
They say the rate, speed and impacts of ocean change are greater, faster and more imminent than previously thought -- and they expect summertime Arctic sea ice cover will have disappeared in around 25 years. ...
Mon, Oct 14, 2013 from Washington Post: Study links warmer water temperatures to greater levels of mercury in fish ...In a lab experiment, researchers adjusted temperatures in tanks, tainted the killifish's food with traces of methylmercury and watched as the fish stored high concentrations of the metal in their tissue.
In a field experiment in nearby salt pools, they observed as killifish in warmer pools ate their natural food and stored metal in even higher concentrations, like some toxic condiment for larger fish that would later prey on them.
The observation was part of a study showing how killifish at the bottom of the food chain will probably absorb higher levels of methylmercury in an era of global warming and pass it on to larger predator fish, such as the tuna stacked in shiny little cans in the cupboards of Americans and other people the world over.
...
It would seem our energy system exists solely to serve mercury.
Mon, Oct 7, 2013 from Canadian Press, via HuffingtonPost: Starfish Deaths Alarm Vancouver Scientists Last month, a diver alerted Vancouver Aquarium staff that he had found a number of dead and decaying sunflower sea stars in the cold Pacific waters of a popular dive spot just off the shore of West Vancouver.
Within weeks, the tentacled orange sea stars had all but disappeared in Howe Sound and Vancouver Harbour, disintegrating where they sat on the ocean floor....
"Where the population density had been highest in summer of 2012, on the western shore of Hutt Island, all the sunflower sea stars are gone from that area, with rivers of ossicles (a hard body part) filling ledges and crevices," Marliave wrote in his blog....
The Howe Sound research team have heard from veterinarians and other marine experts that similar die-offs have taken place in Florida and California....
In July, researchers at the University of Rhode Island reported that sea stars were dying in a similar way from New Jersey to Maine, and the university was working with colleagues at Brown and Roger Williams universities to figure out the cause. ...
Mon, Oct 7, 2013 from New York Review of Books (of Stung! by Lisa-ann Gershwin: Jelly Jolt: On Jellyfish Blooms and the Future of the Ocean It's now known that the brush of a single tentacle is enough to induce "Irukandji syndrome." It sets in twenty to thirty minutes after a sting so minor it leaves no mark, and is often not even felt. Pain is initially focused in the lower back. Soon the entire lumbar region is gripped by debilitating cramps and pounding pain--as if someone is taking a baseball bat to your kidneys. Then comes the nausea and vomiting, which continues every minute or so for around twelve hours. Shooting spasms grip the arms and legs, blood pressure escalates, breathing becomes difficult, and the skin begins to creep, as if worms are burrowing through it. Victims are often gripped with a sense of "impending doom" and in their despair beg their doctors to put them out of their misery....
If I offered evidence that jellyfish are displacing penguins in Antarctica--not someday, but now, today--what would you think? If I suggested that jellyfish could crash the world's fisheries, outcompete the tuna and swordfish, and starve the whales to extinction, would you believe me?...
To understand why jellyfish are taking over, we need to understand where they live and how they breed, feed, and die. Jellyfish are almost ubiquitous in the oceans. As survivors of an earlier, less hospitable world, they can flourish where few other species can venture. Their low metabolic rate, and thus low oxygen requirement, allows them to thrive in waters that would suffocate other marine creatures. Some jellyfish can even absorb oxygen into their bells, allowing them to "dive" into oxygen-less waters like a diver with scuba gear and forage there for up to two hours.
...
Tue, Oct 1, 2013 from The Guardian: Jellyfish clog pipes of Swedish nuclear reactor, forcing plant shutdown A huge cluster of jellyfish forced the Oskarshamn plant, the site of one of the world's largest nuclear reactors, to shut down by clogging the pipes conducting cool water to the turbines.
Operators of the plant on the Baltic coast in south-east Sweden had to scramble reactor No 3 on Sunday after tons of jellyfish were caught in the pipes....
The species that caused the Oskarshamn shutdown is known as the common moon jellyfish.
"It's one of the species that can bloom in extreme areas that ... are over-fished or have bad conditions," said Moller. "The moon jelly likes these types of waters. They don't care if there are algae blooms, they don't care if the oxygen concentration is low. The fish leave ... and [the moon jelly] can really take over the ecosystem." ...
Tue, Oct 1, 2013 from The Atlantic, on IPCC5: We Are Terrifyingly Close to the Climate's 'Point of No Return' What makes the IPCC so important is simple: They are required to agree. Last night, the group pulled an all-nighter to ensure that representatives from all 195 member countries agreed on every single word of the 36-page "summary for policymakers" (pdf). That instantly makes the report the world's scientific and political authority on what is happening to the climate, what will happen in the future, and what needs to be done to avoid the worst impacts....
According to the report, the world can emit about 300 gigatons more carbon (total, ever) before there is a 50 percent confidence the world will reach warming of 2 degrees Celsius, which is the previously agreed upon "point of no return" for the climate system. For reference, 531 gigatons was emitted from 1870 to 2011. On a continued "business as usual" trajectory, the world will burn through about 5 times that safety limit by 2100, putting the world on a path for warming of more than 4.5 degrees Celsius and about a meter of additional sea level rise. This idea of a 'global carbon budget' -- a precursor to a possible global price on carbon emissions -- was endorsed by the group for the first time.
Without jumping up and down on the desks of their computer terminals, this forum of scientists has done about as much as they can do. With this report, they have proven humankind's impact on the climate, and confidently projected dire consequences should world governments fail to act immediately.
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Luckily, everyone listens to egghead scientists when they all agree!
Tue, Sep 24, 2013 from The Independent: Coral alert: destruction of reefs 'accelerating' with half destroyed over past 30 years The rapid decline of the world's coral reefs appears to be accelerating, threatening to destroy huge swathes of marine life unless dramatic action is swiftly taken, a leading ocean scientist has warned.
About half of the world's coral reefs have already been destroyed over the past 30 years, as climate change warms the sea and rising carbon emissions make it more acidic....
"Our oceans are in an unprecedented state of decline due to pollution, over-fishing and climate change. The state of the reefs is very poor and it is continuing to deteriorate," said Professor Hoegh-Guldberg, of the University of Queensland.
"This is an eco-system that has been around for tens of millions of years and we are wiping it out within a hundred. It's quite incredible." ...
Do you get it yet, Nature? We can kick your ass until we're dead.
Sun, Sep 15, 2013 from PLoS One, via ScienceDaily: Unprecedented Rate and Scale of Ocean Acidification Found in the Arctic Acidification of the Arctic Ocean is occurring faster than projected, according to new findings published in the journal PLoS ONE. The increase in rate is being blamed on rapidly melting sea ice, a process that may have important consequences for health of the Arctic ecosystem....
The new research shows that acidification in surface waters of the Arctic Ocean is rapidly expanding into areas that were previously isolated from contact with the atmosphere due to the former widespread ice cover.
"A remarkable 20 percent of the Canadian Basin has become more corrosive to carbonate minerals in an unprecedented short period of time. Nowhere on Earth have we documented such large scale, rapid ocean acidification" according to lead researcher and ocean acidification project chief, U.S. Geological Survey oceanographer Lisa Robbins....
"Not only is the ice cover removed leaving the surface water exposed to human-made carbon dioxide, the surface layer of frigid waters is now fresher, and this means less calcium and carbonate ions are available for organisms."
...
Kinda stands to reason: there ain't no ocean icidification going on!
Fri, Aug 30, 2013 from The Independent: It holds enough water to raise sea levels 50 metres, but East Antarctica ice sheet is even more unstable than we thought Declassified images from spy satellites going back 50 years have revealed that the coastal glaciers and floating sea ice of Antarctica are more susceptible to air and sea temperatures than previously supposed, the researchers found.
The images, which cover thousands of miles of East Antarctic's coastline and include measurements of 175 glaciers, show there is rapid and synchronised melting and freezing when local temperatures increase or fall, according to the study published in Nature....
"It was a big surprise therefore to see rapid and synchronous changes in advance and retreat, but it made perfect sense when we looked at the climate and sea-ice data. When it was warm and the sea-ice decreased, most glaciers retreated, but when it was cooler and the sea ice increased, the glaciers advanced," Dr Stokes said
...
Warning ahead! Antarctica may answer to the laws of thermodynamics!
Tue, Aug 27, 2013 from Nature: Rising ocean acidity will exacerbate global warming The slow and inexorable increase in the oceans' acidity as they soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere could itself have an effect on climate and amplify global warming, according to a new study. Acidification would lead certain marine organisms to emit less of the sulphur compounds that help to seed the formation of clouds and so keep the planet cool....
Adding in the effects of acidification on DMS, which the team calculated using three different estimates of the strength of the link between pH and DMS production, led to additional increases ranging between 0.23 and 0.48 degrees C. Their paper is published in Nature Climate Change today.
(Thanks, DesdemonaDespair) ...
Mon, Aug 5, 2013 from London Guardian: Climate change pushing marine life towards the poles, says study Rising ocean temperatures are rearranging the biological make-up of our oceans, pushing species towards the poles by 7kms every year, as they chase the climates they can survive in, according to new research.
The study, conducted by a working group of scientists from 17 different institutions, gathered data from seven different countries and found the warming oceans are causing marine species to alter their breeding, feeding and migration patterns. ...
Republican creatures head north; Democrat creatures head south.
Sat, Aug 3, 2013 from William Ruckelshaus, Lee Thomas, WiIliam Reilly and Christine Todd Whitman, in NYT: A Republican Case for Climate Action Each of us took turns over the past 43 years running the Environmental Protection Agency. We served Republican presidents, but we have a message that transcends political affiliation: the United States must move now on substantive steps to curb climate change, at home and internationally.
There is no longer any credible scientific debate about the basic facts: our world continues to warm, with the last decade the hottest in modern records, and the deep ocean warming faster than the earth's atmosphere. Sea level is rising. Arctic Sea ice is melting years faster than projected.
The costs of inaction are undeniable. The lines of scientific evidence grow only stronger and more numerous. And the window of time remaining to act is growing smaller: delay could mean that warming becomes "locked in." ...
Tue, Jul 23, 2013 from PhysOrg: Sea level rise: New iceberg theory points to areas at risk of rapid disintegration In events that could exacerbate sea level rise over the coming decades, stretches of ice on the coasts of Antarctica and Greenland are at risk of rapidly cracking apart and falling into the ocean, according to new iceberg calving simulations from the University of Michigan.
"If this starts to happen and we're right, we might be closer to the higher end of sea level rise estimates for the next 100 years," said Jeremy Bassis, assistant professor of atmospheric, oceanic and space sciences at the U-M College of Engineering, and first author of a paper on the new model published in the current issue of Nature Geoscience....
"Essentially, everything is driven by gravity," Bassis said. "We identified a critical threshold of one kilometer where it seems like everything should break up. You can think of it in terms of a kid building a tower. The taller the tower is, the more unstable it gets."...
...
Mon, Jul 15, 2013 from The Independent: Massive ice sheets melting 'at rate of 300bn tonnes a year', climate satellite shows "In the course of the mission, it has become apparent that ice sheets are losing substantial amounts of ice - about 300 billion tonnes a year - and that the rate at which these losses occurs is increasing," said Bert Wouters of Bristol University's Glaciology Centre....
In its last report in 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said that average sea levels are rising by about 2 millimetres a year. But, other scientists calculated last year that the true rate is about 3.2mm a year - about 60 per cent faster.
"Compared to the first few years of the Grace mission, the ice sheets' contribution to sea-level rise has almost doubled in recent years," added Dr Wouters, the lead author of the study published in the Earth sciences journal Nature Geoscience. ...
Mon, Jun 24, 2013 from BirdLife International: New report: State of the World's Birds Declines in birds across the globe are providing evidence of a rapid deterioration in the global environment that is affecting all life on earth - including people. However, birds also tell us that saving the planet comes at a relatively small price - an investment that's vital to secure our own future.
These are some of the messages in a new report State of the world's birds: indicators for our changing world by the world's largest Partnership of conservation organisations, BirdLife International, who have gathered in Ottawa, Canada to launch the report and unveil their vision for a world rich in biodiversity, where people and nature live in harmony....
"Birds provide an accurate and easy to read environmental barometer that allows us to see clearly the pressures our current way of life are putting on the world's biodiversity", said Dr Leon Bennun, BirdLife's Director of Science, Information and Policy.... ...
It's as if these bird species were functioning as canaries.
Sun, Jun 16, 2013 from McGill, via EurekAlert: Study of oceans' past raises worries about their future A McGill-led international research team has now completed the first global study of changes that occurred in a crucial component of ocean chemistry, the nitrogen cycle, at the end of the last ice age. The results of their study confirm that oceans are good at balancing the nitrogen cycle on a global scale. But the data also shows that it is a slow process that may take many centuries, or even millennia, raising worries about the effects of the scale and speed of current changes in the ocean....
"We are changing the planet in ways we are not even aware of," says Galbraith. "You wouldn't think that putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere would change the amount of nitrogen available to fish in the ocean, but it clearly does. It is important to realize just how interconnected everything is." ...
Interconnecteness means always having to say you're sorry.
Mon, Jun 3, 2013 from Montreal Gazette: US Atlantic puffin population in peril as fish stocks shift, ocean waters heat up The Atlantic puffin population is at risk in the United States, and there are signs the seabirds are in distress in other parts of the world.
In the Gulf of Maine, the comical-looking seabirds have been dying of starvation and losing body weight, possibly because of shifting fish populations as ocean temperatures rise, according to scientists.
...
Sun, Apr 28, 2013 from Bangor Daily News: Ocean surface temperatures off Northeast coast highest in 150 years Data collected from the Gulf of Maine indicates that the average sea surface temperature in the gulf has risen 1.5 degrees from 2011 to 2012 and that in the past four years, it has risen between 2 and 3.5 degrees, depending on how one looks at the data collected from scientific studies.
With the rising temperatures come concerns, and some indication, about how marine life along the coast will be affected.
Officials and scientists in Maine have suggested that higher temperatures in the Gulf of Maine have been a factor in bacterial outbreaks in bivalves and in sea lice infestations in Cobscook and Passamaquoddy bays. Some have put partial blame on the gulf's warmer waters for a northeasterly shift of cod in the gulf into colder waters, for declining shrimp catches and for the glut of soft-shell lobsters last summer that caused a plummet in prices lobstermen were receiving for their catch....
Over the past 40 years, roughly half of 36 fish stocks in the northwest Atlantic Ocean studied by NEFSC have shifted northward, the statement added. ...
Wed, Apr 3, 2013 from Mongabay: Scientists find the 'missing heat' of global warming 700 meters below the sea Critics of climate change often claim that warming has stopped since the late 1990s. While this is categorically false (the last decade was the warmest on record and 2005 and 2010 are generally considered tied for the warmest year), scientists do admit that warming hasn't occurred over land as rapidly as predicted in the last ten years, especially given continually rising greenhouse gas emissions. But a recent study in Geophysical Research Letters has found this so-called missing heat: 700 meters below the surface of the ocean...."This signals the beginning of the most sustained warming trend in this record of [ocean heat content]," the scientists write in the paper. "Indeed, recent warming rates of the waters below 700 meters appear to be unprecedented."
...
We are nothing if not masters of the unprecedented consequence.
Tue, Mar 5, 2013 from PNAS, via PhysOrg: Global warming will open unexpected new shipping routes in Arctic, researchers find "The development is both exciting from an economic development point of view and worrisome in terms of safety, both for the Arctic environment and for the ships themselves," said lead researcher Laurence C. Smith, a professor of geography at UCLA. The findings, which explore accessibility during the Arctic's most navigable month of the year, September, appear in the latest issue of the scholarly journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Plus. The first thorough assessment of trans-Arctic shipping potential as global temperatures continue to rise, the study is based on independent climate forecasts for the years 2040 to 2059. By mid-century, even ordinary shipping vessels will be able to navigate previously inaccessible parts of the Arctic Ocean, and they will not need icebreakers to blaze their path as they do today, the researchers found. "We're talking about a future in which open-water vessels will, at least during some years, be able to navigate unescorted through the Arctic, which at the moment is inconceivable," said co-author Scott R. Stephenson, a Ph.D. candidate in the UCLA Department of Geography.
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Mon, Nov 5, 2012 from Geological Society of America: Why Seas Are Rising Ahead of Predictions: Estimates of Rate of Future Sea-Level Rise May Be Too Low Sea levels are rising faster than expected from global warming, and University of Colorado geologist Bill Hay has a good idea why. The last official IPCC report in 2007 projected a global sea level rise between 0.2 and 0.5 meters by the year 2100. But current sea-level rise measurements meet or exceed the high end of that range and suggest a rise of one meter or more by the end of the century. "What's missing from the models used to forecast sea-level rise are critical feedbacks that speed everything up," says Hay... One of those feedbacks involves Arctic sea ice, another the Greenland ice cap, and another soil moisture and groundwater mining. ...
Tue, Oct 16, 2012 from Climate Central: New Study Ties Hurricane Strength To Global Warming One of the major unanswered questions about climate change is whether hurricanes have become more frequent and stronger as the world has warmed. Until now, there hasn't been enough evidence to settle the question, but a report published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences may have changed all that. Using an entirely new method of tallying hurricane power and frequency, a team of scientists say that hurricanes are, indeed, more of a danger when ocean temperatures are higher. "In particular, we estimate that Katrina-magnitude events have been twice as frequent in warm years compared with cold years," the report says. ...
Tue, Oct 9, 2012 from London Guardian: Warm North Atlantic Ocean causing UK's wet summers, study shows The UK's dismal recent summers can be blamed on a substantial warming of the North Atlantic Ocean in the late 1990s, according to new scientific research. The shift has resulted in rain-soaked weather systems being driven into northern Europe, increasing summer rainfall by about a third.... The summer of 2012 was the wettest in a century and follows a series of above average years for summer rainfall. ...
Tue, Oct 2, 2012 from FOX News: Half of Great Barrier Reef has vanished, study finds Australia's Great Barrier Reef is a glittering gem -- the world's largest coral reef ecosystem -- chock-full of diverse marine life. But new research shows it is also in steep decline, with half of the reef vanishing in the past 27 years.
Katharina Fabricius, a coral reef ecologist at the Australian Institute of Marine Science and study co-author, told LiveScience that she has been diving and working on the reef since 1988 -- and has watched the decline. "I hear of the changes anecdotally, but this is the first long-term look at the overall status of the reef. There are still a lot of fish, and you can see giant clams, but not the same color and diversity as in the past."...
The biggest factors are smashing from tropical cyclones, crown-of-thorns starfish that eat coral and are boosted by nutrient runoff from agriculture, and coral bleaching from high-temperatures, which are rising due to climate change.
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Thu, Sep 27, 2012 from PhysOrg: Sea of the living dead The world's coral reefs have become a zombie ecosystem, neither dead nor truly alive, and are on a trajectory to collapse within a human generation according to an academic from The Australian National University.
Professor Roger Bradbury, an ecologist from the Crawford School of Public Policy in the ANU College of Asia and the Pacific, said overfishing, ocean acidification and pollution are pushing coral reefs into oblivion. "The scientific evidence for this is compelling and unequivocal, but there seems to be a collective reluctance to accept the logical conclusion--that there is no hope of saving the global coral reef ecosystem," he said. "There is no real prospect of changing the trajectory of coral reef destruction in less than 20 to 50 years. In short, these forces are unstoppable and irreversible. "By persisting in the false belief that coral reefs have a future, we grossly misallocate the funds needed to cope with the fallout from their collapse. Money isn't spent to study what to do after the reefs are gone."
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Mon, Sep 24, 2012 from Hartford Connecticut Mirror: Millstone shutdown is a sign of broader power problem caused by climate change Last month's unprecedented 12-day shutdown of part of the Millstone Nuclear Power Station sent a shudder through the nuclear energy world.
Caused when the seawater used to cool the plant's generating Unit 2 became too warm, it was the first time any U.S. nuclear plant was shut down because of intake water temperature problems.... The shutdown capped a season of power reductions and other difficulties at several of the nation's power plants -- including non-nuclear ones -- caused when summer heat and drought compromised the vast amounts of water needed to cool them. It has also set in motion a cascade of other potentially debilitating effects, all of which point to the likelihood that climate change has placed part of the U.S. power grid at risk. ...
Fri, Sep 21, 2012 from CBC: Scientists predict record ocean temperatures in 2012 Canadian and U.S. scientists are predicting 2012 will set records for warm ocean temperatures on the eastern Seaboard.
Dave Hebert, a research scientist with the Bedford Institute of Oceanography, said temperatures off Nova Scotia in August were about two degrees above normal.
"We're actually seeing it in all the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the Scotian Shelf all the way up to the Labrador Shelf. All warming up a couple of degrees," Hebert told CBC News.
He said the department of fisheries and oceans has not yet calculated temperatures for 2012, however he expects it to break records....
"When the fish migrate from fresh water, they will be entering a much warmer ocean with a more aggressive predator field so that the warmer it gets there would be higher mortality occurring on these stocks," said Friedman.
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Call me a WARMISTA: Want A Recovery, Mankind? I Suspect Trauma Ahead.
Wed, Sep 19, 2012 from University of New South Wales : Warming Ocean Could Start Big Shift of Antarctic Ice Fast-flowing and narrow glaciers have the potential to trigger massive changes in the Antarctic ice sheet and contribute to rapid ice-sheet decay and sea-level rise, a new study has found... The finding is important because of the enormous scale and potential impact the Antarctic ice sheets could have on sea-level rise if they shift rapidly, says Fogwill. "To get a sense of the scale, the Antarctic ice sheet is 3km deep -- three times the height of the Blue Mountains in many areas -- and it extends across an area that is equivalent to the distance between Perth and Sydney.
"Despite its potential impact, Antarctica's effect on future sea level was not fully included in the last IPCC report because there was insufficient information about the behavior of the ice sheet. This research changes that....["] ...
Fri, Sep 7, 2012 from AP, hosted on Google: Report: 'Time is running out' for Caribbean coral An international conservation organization is painting a grim picture of the Caribbean's iconic coral reefs.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature says the Caribbean's reefs are in sharp decline, with live coral coverage down to an average of just 8 percent. That's down from 50 percent in the 1970s. The non-governmental organization released a report Friday at an international environmental conference in Korea.
The causes include overfishing, pollution, disease and bleaching caused by rising global temperatures. The group says the situation is somewhat better in some places, including the Dutch islands of the southern Caribbean and the British territory of the Cayman Islands, with up to 30 percent cover in places.
But the union concludes that "time is running out" and new safeguards are urgently needed. ...
What an opportunity! Nanocoral™ anyone? How 'bout micro-robotic coral?
Fri, Aug 17, 2012 from The Independent: Seas score a meagre six out of 10 in new marine health index Marine scientists have for the first time worked out a systematic way of scoring the health of the world's oceans, in an attempt to assess how well they are coping with the pressures of overfishing, pollution and anything else that affects the well-being of the sea.
The overall global score for the Earth's coastal seas is 60 points out of a possible maximum of 100, showing there is still plenty of "room for improvement", they concluded.
Some areas with the lowest scores, such as the coastal waters off the troubled West African state of Sierra Leone, which scored 36, failed in almost every one of the 10 measures the scientists used to assess the health of the sea. ...
Wed, Aug 15, 2012 from Mongabay: NASA image shows Northwest Passage open A satellite image released by NASA last week shows a key channel that forms part of the Northwest Passage is partially free of ice....
Predictions range widely, but many experts expect the Arctic to be free of summer sea ice entirely within a few decades. By almost all standards, sea ice is disappearing faster than expected, partly a consequence of a positive feedback loop triggered by retreating ice. Sea ice typically helps cool the Arctic by reflecting sunlight back into space. But when sea ice melts, the dark areas of open water absorb the sun's radiation, warming the region and worsening melting.
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Mon, Jul 23, 2012 from Reuters: Bacteria outbreak in Northern Europe due to ocean warming, study says Manmade climate change is the main driver behind the unexpected emergence of a group of bacteria in northern Europe which can cause gastroenteritis, new research by a group of international experts shows.
The paper, published in the journal Nature Climate Change on Sunday, provided some of the first firm evidence that the warming patterns of the Baltic Sea have coincided with the emergence of Vibrio infections in northern Europe.
Vibrios is a group of bacteria which usually grow in warm and tropical marine environments. The bacteria can cause various infections in humans, ranging from cholera to gastroenteritis-like symptoms from eating raw or undercooked shellfish or from exposure to seawater. ...
Blessed are bacteria, for they shall inherit the earth.
Sun, Jul 22, 2012 from New Scientist: 2011 heatwave transformed Australian marine life Heatwaves aren't just a problem for humans. They can reshape marine ecosystems too. Such extreme weather events will become more common because of climate change. They can ravage land ecosystems, but until now little has been known about their effects in the seas.
Events last year in the sea off Australia's west coast suggest that the impact can be extreme and rapid. For more than ten weeks beginning in January, sea temperatures were between 2 deg C and 4 deg C warmer than usual along a 2000-kilometre stretch of coast - the area's most extreme warming event since records began....
The ecosystem had lost complexity. The kelp (Ecklonia radiate) that covered 80 per cent of the area, providing a range of habitats, had declined to cover just 50 per cent. Mats of algal "turf", which create fewer distinct niches, had moved in instead....
Thomas predicts that climate change will commit 15 to 37 per cent of species to extinction by 2050 (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature02121). He says the toll may be made worse by more frequent extreme weather events. ...
Perhaps it's time for some extreme grassroots events!
Mon, Jul 16, 2012 from Texas A&M University: Antarctica at Risk from Human Activities The continent of Antarctica is at risk from human activities and other forces, and environmental management is needed to protect the planet's last great wilderness area, says an international team of researchers, including a Texas A&M University oceanographer, in a paper published in the current issue of Science magazine.... Antarctica faces growing threats from global warming, loss of sea ice and landed ice, increased tourism, over-fishing in the region, pollution and invasive species creeping into the area. One of the longer-term concerns that may present the greatest threat overall is the potential for oil, gas and mineral exploitation on the continent and in the surrounding ocean... ...
Why should anywhere on the planet be immune from this virus called humanity?
Mon, Jul 2, 2012 from Reuters: Rise in sea level can't be stopped: scientists Rising sea levels cannot be stopped over the next several hundred years, even if deep emissions cuts lower global average temperatures, but they can be slowed down, climate scientists said in a study on Sunday...
Rising sea levels threaten about a tenth of the world's population who live in low-lying areas and islands which are at risk of flooding, including the Caribbean, Maldives and Asia-Pacific island groups.
More than 180 countries are negotiating a new global climate pact which will come into force by 2020 and force all nations to cut emissions to limit warming to below 2 degrees Celsius this century - a level scientists say is the minimum required to avert catastrophic effects.
But even if the most ambitious emissions cuts are made, it might not be enough to stop sea levels rising due to the thermal expansion of sea water, said scientists at the United States' National Centre for Atmospheric Research, U.S. research organization Climate Central and Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research in Melbourne. ...
Mon, Jun 11, 2012 from Australian Broadcasting Corporation: Greenhouse gases largely to blame for warming oceans: scientists A new US-led study, featuring research by Tasmanian scientists, has concluded that warming ocean temperatures over the past 50 years are largely a man-made phenomenon.
Researchers from America, India, Japan and Australia say the study is the most comprehensive look at how the oceans have warmed.
The study, published today in the journal Nature Climate Change, examined a dozen different models used to project climate change, and compared them with observations of ocean warming over the past 50 years.
It found natural variations accounted for about 10 per cent of rising temperatures, but man-made greenhouse gases were the major cause. ...
Tue, Jun 5, 2012 from International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis: US and European Energy Supplies Vulnerable to Climate Change Higher water temperatures and reduced river flows in Europe and the United States in recent years have resulted in reduced production, or temporary shutdown, of several thermoelectric power plants, resulting in increased electricity prices and raising concerns about future energy security in a changing climate.... A study just published in Nature Climate Change projects further disruption to supply, with a likely decrease in thermoelectric power generating capacity of between 6-19 percent in Europe and 4-16 percent in the United States for the period 2031-2060, due to lack of cooling water. ...
No worries! We'll have icebergs and ice shelves galore breaking off and cooling the waters!
Tue, May 29, 2012 from EnvironmentalResearchWeb: Latest Southern Ocean research shows continuing deep ocean change Comparing detailed measurements taken during the Australian Antarctic program's 2012 Southern Ocean marine science voyage to historical data dating back to 1970, scientists estimate there has been as much as a 60 per cent reduction in the volume of Antarctic Bottom Water, the cold dense water that drives global ocean currents....
"It's a clear signal to us that the oceans are responding rapidly to variations in climate in polar regions. The sinking of dense water around Antarctica is part of a global pattern of ocean currents that has a strong influence on climate, so evidence that these waters are changing is important," Dr Rintoul said....
"When we speak of global warming, we really mean ocean warming: more than 90 per cent of the extra heat energy stored by the earth over the last 50 years has gone into warming up the ocean...." ...
Fri, Apr 27, 2012 from Associated Press: Study: Antarctic ice melting from warm water below Antarctica's massive ice shelves are shrinking because they are being eaten away from below by warm water, a new study finds. That suggests that future sea levels could rise faster than many scientists have been predicting.
The western chunk of Antarctica is losing 23 feet of its floating ice sheet each year. Until now, scientists weren't exactly sure how it was happening and whether or how man-made global warming might be a factor. The answer, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature, is that climate change plays an indirect role -- but one that has larger repercussions than if Antarctic ice were merely melting from warmer air. ...
Mon, Apr 9, 2012 from The Daily Climate: Warming Atlantic primes the Amazon for fire ...Scientists used to think the rainforest, especially in the western Amazon, was too wet to burn. But major fire seasons in 2005 and 2010 made them reconsider. Fires are a major source of carbon emissions in the Amazon, and scientists are beginning to worry that the region could become a net emitter, instead of a carbon sink. New findings link rising ocean temperatures off the northern coast of Brazil to changing weather patterns: As the Atlantic warms, it draws moisture away from the forest, priming the region for bigger fires.
"We are reaching a tipping point in terms of drought, beyond which these forests can catch fire," says Daniel Nepstad, international program director at the Amazon Environmental Research Institute in Brasilia, Brazil. ...
Wed, Apr 4, 2012 from ClimateWire: Dying corals -- milestones along a meandering path to famine ...Already, there is evidence that as the ocean warms, many commercial fish stocks are moving poleward in search of cooler waters. Rising ocean temperatures have triggered coral bleaching events that have caused widespread damage to the world's reefs, which serve as a habitat for many species....
Researchers are also concerned about the effects that shifting ocean chemistry will have on marine ecosystems. As the world's carbon dioxide output has risen, oceans have absorbed more and more of the heat-trapping gas, leaving seawater 30 percent more acidic than it was before the Industrial Revolution began.
Eventually, ocean acidification could scramble ocean ecosystems by making it harder for sea creatures like oysters, coral and plankton to grow the hard, chalky shells that protect them from predators. ...
No matter where those fish go we'll track em down!
Sat, Feb 18, 2012 from UBC: Ocean acidification turns climate change winners into losers Previous projections have suggested the effects of warmer water temperature would result in fish moving pole-ward and deeper towards cooler waters - and an increase of fish catch potential of as much as 30 per cent in the North Atlantic by 2050.
Accounting for effects of de-oxygenation and ocean acidification, however, some regions may see a 20-35 per cent reduction in maximum catch potential by 2050 (relative to 2005) - depending on the individual species' sensitivity to ocean acidification.
For example, in the Norwegian Sea, ocean warming by itself may result in a 15 per cent increase in fisheries catch potential. However, accounting for acidification and de-oxygenation, the increase turns to a decrease of 15 per cent, and the region from a "winner" to a "loser." ...
Careful now -- that makes it seem like climate change could make us all losers!
Wed, Feb 15, 2012 from Live Science: Global Warming Makes Elephant Seals Dive Deeper, Study Suggests Lumbering elephant seals in Antarctica seem to be taking the heat from global warming, as scientists have found the mammals must dive to deeper than normal depths in warmer seas to snag food. The deeper dives may also mean less time to get food, the researchers say... Their dive depth, it seems, depends on the prey the elephant seals are searching for. And as their watery world warms, the researchers found, the squid and fish that are usually in waters above 3,280 feet (1,000 m) are forced to deeper waters.
...
From what I hear, the deeper the food, the tastier the finds.
Wed, Feb 15, 2012 from Japan Times: Deep-sea temperature up 0.02 degree every decade Seawater to a depth of up to 700 meters is warming at a pace of 0.02 degree every 10 years worldwide, according to an analysis by the Meteorological Agency. In its first analysis into deep-water temperatures, the agency says that rises in seawater temperatures could lead to higher sea levels because heat expands, and to an accelerated pace of global warming because the warmer water may absorb less carbon dioxide. ...
Geoengineering idea: Drop Titanic-sized ice cubes into ocean.
Mon, Jan 23, 2012 from BBC: Arctic Ocean freshwater bulge detected UK scientists have detected a huge dome of freshwater that is developing in the western Arctic Ocean.
The bulge is some 8,000 cubic km in size and has risen by about 15cm since 2002.
The team thinks it may be the result of strong winds whipping up a great clockwise current in the northern polar region called the Beaufort Gyre....
"What we seen occurring is precisely what the climate models had predicted," said Dr Giles.
"When you have clockwise rotation - the freshwater is stored. If the wind goes the other way - and that has happened in the past - then the freshwater can be pushed to the margins of the Arctic Ocean.
"If the spin-up starts to spin down, the freshwater could be released. It could go to the rest of the Arctic Ocean or even leave the Arctic Ocean."
If the freshwater were to enter the North Atlantic in large volumes, the concern would be that it might disturb the currents that have such a great influence on European weather patterns. These currents draw warm waters up from the tropics, maintaining milder temperatures in winter than would ordinarily be expected at northern European latitudes. ...
Is that a bulge in your Arctic, or are you just happy to be predicted?
Thu, Jan 5, 2012 from TED, via The Oil Drum: Jeremy Jackson talks about How We Wrecked the Ocean
Jeremy Jackson is the Ritter Professor of Oceanography and Director of the Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. ...
Tue, Jan 3, 2012 from Agence France-Press: World-first hybrid shark found off Australia Scientists said on Tuesday that they had discovered the world's first hybrid sharks in Australian waters, a potential sign the predators were adapting to cope with climate change.
The mating of the local Australian black-tip shark with its global counterpart, the common black-tip, was an unprecedented discovery with implications for the entire shark world, said lead researcher Jess Morgan.
"It's very surprising because no one's ever seen shark hybrids before, this is not a common occurrence by any stretch of the imagination," Morgan, from the University of Queensland, told AFP. ...
Mon, Nov 21, 2011 from London Guardian: Rich nations 'give up' on new climate treaty until 2020 Governments of the world's richest countries have given up on forging a new treaty on climate change to take effect this decade, with potentially disastrous consequences for the environment through global warming.
Ahead of critical talks starting next week, most of the world's leading economies now privately admit that no new global climate agreement will be reached before 2016 at the earliest, and that even if it were negotiated by then, they would stipulate it could not come into force until 2020.
The eight-year delay is the worst contemplated by world governments during 20 years of tortuous negotiations on greenhouse gas emissions, and comes despite intensifying warnings from scientists and economists about the rapidly increasing dangers of putting off prompt action. ...
Given the lack of enthusiasm among our leaders, it's time to Occupy Mother Earth.
Tue, Oct 4, 2011 from Los Angeles Times: Big catches mask dwindling numbers of sea bass As reliably as masses of sea bass gather off the Southern California coast each summer, boatloads of anglers arrive to reel them in.
But their bountiful catches are an illusion, scientists say.
The populations of kelp bass and barred sand bass, two of the most popular -- and easy to catch -- saltwater fishes in Southern California, have plummeted 90 percent since 1980, according to a study led by a researcher at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego.
Overfishing and warmer ocean temperatures are blamed for the stunning decline.
...
Tue, Sep 20, 2011 from Reuters: "Missing" global heat may hide in deep oceans The mystery of Earth's missing heat may have been solved: it could lurk deep in oceans, temporarily masking the climate-warming effects of greenhouse gas emissions, researchers reported on Sunday.
Climate scientists have long wondered where this so-called missing heat was going, especially over the last decade, when greenhouse emissions kept increasing but world air temperatures did not rise correspondingly.
The build-up of energy and heat in Earth's system is important to track because of its bearing on current weather and future climate... Computer simulations suggest most of it was trapped in layers of oceans deeper than 1,000 feet (305 metres) during periods like the last decade when air temperatures failed to warm as much as they might have. ...
Thu, Sep 8, 2011 from BBC: Giant crabs make Antarctic leap King crabs have been found on the edge of Antarctica, probably as a result of warming in the region, scientists say.
Writing in the journal Proceedings B, scientists report a large, reproductive population of crabs in the Palmer Deep, a basin cut in the continental shelf.
They suggest the crabs were washed in during an upsurge of warmer water.
The crabs are voracious crushers of sea floor animals and will probably change the ecosystem profoundly if and when they spread further, researchers warn.
Related species have been found around islands off the Antarctic Peninsula and on the outer edge of the continental shelf.
But here the crabs (Neolithodes yaldwyni) are living and reproducing in abundance right on the edge of the continent itself. ...
Thu, Sep 1, 2011 from MSNBC: Second giant ice island set to break off Greenland glacier New photographs taken of a vast glacier in northern Greenland have revealed the astonishing rate of its breakup, with one scientist saying he was rendered "speechless."
In August 2010, part of the Petermann Glacier about four times the size of Manhattan island broke off , prompting a hearing in Congress.
Researcher Alun Hubbard, of the Centre for Glaciology at Aberystwyth University, U.K., told msnbc.com by phone that another section, about twice the size of Manhattan, appeared close to breaking off....
In 2009, scientists installed GPS masts on the glacier to track its movement. But when they returned in July this year, they found the ice had been melting so quickly -- at an unexpected 16-and-a-half feet in two years -- that some of the masts stuck into the glacier were no longer in position....
"I'm very familiar with the glacier. It's very hard to sort of envisage something so big not being there ... to come back and basically see an ice shelf has disappeared, which is 20 kilometers across (about 12 miles) ... I was speechless and started laughing because I couldn't sort of believe it," Hubbard added, speaking to msnbc.com.
...
Sun, Aug 28, 2011 from EPOCA: Warming of the Mediterranean Sea hampers the resistance of corals and mollusks to ocean acidification Some calcifiers (mussels, gastropods and corals) protect their shell or skeleton from the corrosive effects of increasing ocean acidification. They can therefore resist some of the damaging effects of increasing ocean acidity generated by the release of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere through human activities. This resistance is diminished when organisms are exposed to extended period of elevated temperature (28.5 deg C). This is a result of an international study (1), co-led by Jean-Pierre Gattuso, research scientist at Laboratoire d'océanographie de Villefranche (CNRS/UPMC), published in the journal Nature Climate Change. These results suggest that the ongoing and future warming of the Mediterranean combined with the rise of its acidity will increase the frequency of mass-mortality events....
The tissues and organic layers covering the shells and skeletons play a major role to protect them from the corrosive action of high-acidity seawater. However, the areas of shells and skeletons that are not protected by tissues or organic layers are vulnerable and more prone to dissolution. The higher the acidity, the faster dissolution is. The scientists have shown that this capacity to resist is much lower when the organisms are subject to an extended period of elevated temperature (28.5°C). At this temperature, mortality is increasing with increasing acidity.
Some Mediterranean invertebrates already live at their upper limit of temperature tolerance and have already experienced mass-mortality events. The combined effect of warming and increased acidity will likely increase the frequency of these events in the future. ...
Tue, Aug 2, 2011 from PNAS, via Irish Weather Online: Small Amounts Of Warming Could Trigger Rapid Ice Shelf Collapse Only small amounts of subsurface warming of water is required to trigger a rapid collapse of ice shelves, according to a new report to be published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences....
The findings, the researchers say, provide historical evidence that warming of water by 3-4 degrees was enough to trigger these huge, episodic discharges of ice from the Laurentide Ice Sheet in what is now Canada.
They claim the results are important due to concerns that warmer water could cause a comparatively fast collapse of ice shelves in Antarctica or Greenland, increasing the flow of ice into the ocean and raising sea levels. One of the most vulnerable areas, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, would raise global sea level by about 11 feet if it were all to melt.
"We don't know whether or not water will warm enough to cause this type of phenomenon," said Shaun Marcott, a postdoctoral researcher at Oregon State University (OSU) and lead author of the report. "But it would be a serious concern if it did, and this demonstrates that melting of this type has occurred before."
...
Then we'd better stop all that hot air coming from the scientists!
Mon, Jul 11, 2011 from George Monbiot, in the Guardian: Have jellyfish come to rule the waves? Last year I began to wonder, this year doubt is seeping away, to be replaced with a rising fear. Could it really have happened? Could the fishing industry have achieved the remarkable feat of destroying the last great stock?
Until 2010, mackerel were the one reliable catch in Cardigan Bay in west Wales. Though I took to the water dozens of times, there wasn't a day in 2008 or 2009 when I failed to take 10 or more. Once every three or four trips I would hit a major shoal, and bring in 100 or 200 fish: enough, across the season, to fill the freezer and supply much of our protein for the year....
I pushed my kayak off the beach and felt that delightful sensation of gliding away from land almost effortlessly - I'm so used to fighting the westerlies and the waves they whip up in these shallow seas that on this occasion I seemed almost to be drifting towards the horizon. Far below me I could see the luminous feathers I used as bait tripping over the seabed.
But I could also see something else. Jellyfish. Unimaginable numbers of them. Not the transparent cocktail umbrellas I was used to, but solid, white rubbery creatures the size of footballs. They roiled in the surface or loomed, vast and pale, in the depths. There was scarcely a cubic metre of water without one.Apart from that - nothing. It wasn't until I reached a buoy three miles from the shore that I felt the urgent tap of a fish, and brought up a single, juvenile mackerel. ...
In every gaping void there is an opportunity, right? Right?
Mon, Jul 11, 2011 from University of Wisconsin, via EurekAlert: Climate change reducing ocean's carbon dioxide uptake How deep is the ocean's capacity to buffer against climate change?
As one of the planet's largest single carbon absorbers, the ocean takes up roughly one-third of all human carbon emissions, reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide and its associated global changes....
"The ocean is taking up less carbon because of the warming caused by the carbon in the atmosphere," says McKinley, an assistant professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences and a member of the Center for Climatic Research in the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies....
But the researchers found that rising temperatures are slowing the carbon absorption across a large portion of the subtropical North Atlantic. Warmer water cannot hold as much carbon dioxide, so the ocean's carbon capacity is decreasing as it warms. ...
Tue, Jul 5, 2011 from EnvironmentalResearchWeb: Going beyond the IPCC 'worst case' In order to see how climate models react over a wide range of greenhouse gas concentrations, researchers in the US have modelled emissions scenarios that are significantly higher than the IPCC's "worst case" scenarios. They found - perhaps unsurprisingly - that the extent of climate change will be significantly worse than for the IPCC's A1FI scenario.
"Relative to the A1FI scenario, our highest scenario results in an additional 2 deg C (3.6F) of global mean warming above A1FI levels by 2100, a complete loss of Arctic summer sea ice by 2070 and an additional 43 percent sea level rise due to thermal expansion above A1FI levels by 2100," said Ben Sanderson from the National Center for Atmospheric Research in the US....
The team also assumed that the shares of primary energy derived from different fuel sources remain fixed over time at 2000 levels; that is, the carbon intensity of energy supply is assumed to remain constant.
In the second scenario (AllCoal), the researchers make more extreme assumptions. They maintain the A1FI per capita energy projection, but assume population follows the UN high scenario as implemented in the IPCC A2 scenario, reaching 15 billion by 2100. They also make the bounding assumption that all new demand for primary energy is satisfied by coal.
"This assumption is not intended to represent a plausible future, but a useful thought experiment that could help inform the exploration of upper bounds on emissions," said Sanderson. "It is astounding, for example, that this combination of assumptions leads to emissions in 2100 that are about four times those in the A1FI scenario, or about 105 gigatonnes of carbon per year." ...
"Astounding" only if you believe in common sense directing the actions of societies.
Tue, Jul 5, 2011 from Guardian: Thawing Arctic opens up new shipping routes on the 'roof of the world' Cold is the new hot in shipping circles as melting sea ice opens up prospects for trade between China and the west to move across the roof of the world.
An increasing amount of seaborne traffic is beginning to move on the so-called Northern Sea Route which traverses the Siberian coast. There are also hopes of opening up more of the North West Passage above Canada.
The attraction of the voyage is that it is one-third of the distance of more traditional routes through the Suez Canal. This means less carbon-dioxide (CO2) emissions and less fuel. It also means less pirates....
Canadian and American maritime experts say 2 percent of global shipping could be diverted to the Arctic by 2030, rising to 5 percent by 2050.
Already cruise ships are bringing tourists and income to countries such as Greenland. But they are also raising concerns about safety and pollution from oil spills. There is a widespread view that it is only a matter of time before there is a potential emergency: a passenger ship in trouble and potential evacuation into freezing seas. ...
What a positive development for trade, growth, and the sustainability of a consumer society!
Mon, Jul 4, 2011 from University of Arizona, via EurekAlert: Warming ocean layers will undermine polar ice sheets faster than expected Warming of the ocean's subsurface layers will melt underwater portions of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets faster than previously thought, according to new University of Arizona-led research. Such melting would increase the sea level more than already projected.
The research, based on 19 state-of-the-art climate models, proposes a new mechanism by which global warming will accelerate the melting of the great ice sheets during this century and the next.
The subsurface ocean layers surrounding the polar ice sheets will warm substantially as global warming progresses, the scientists found. In addition to being exposed to warming air, underwater portions of the polar ice sheets and glaciers will be bathed in warming seawater....
"Ocean warming is very important compared to atmospheric warming because water has a much larger heat capacity than air," Yin said. "If you put an ice cube in a warm room, it will melt in several hours. But if you put an ice cube in a cup of warm water, it will disappear in just minutes."...
Co-author Jonathan T. Overpeck said, "This does mean that both Greenland and Antarctica are probably going melt faster than the scientific community previously thought." ...
Mon, Jul 4, 2011 from IceNews: Iceland's sea bird stock 'in dismal shape' The nesting season of many types of sea bird all around Iceland has been poor this year and there is an all-out puffin and Arctic tern collapse in progress to the south and west of the country.
Ornithologists say the situation has not looked worse for many decades. Scientists have been travelling around Iceland in recent days and weeks, researching sea bird stocks and the status of their nesting. RUV reported at the weekend that extremely few Arctic tern nests were found on the Snaefellsnes peninsula, where thousands of the birds usually lay their eggs.
A similarly worrying picture is emerging about the puffin stock and the situation is particularly bad on the Westman Islands and the south and west of the Icelandic mainland. Ornithologist Aevar Pedersen told RUV that the situation had been bad last year, but is even worse this year. The overall picture is pretty dismal, he said -- adding that he has not seen a worse breeding season for many years, indeed decades. ...
Fri, Jul 1, 2011 from EnvironmentalResearchWeb: Ocean currents speed melting of Antarctic ice Stronger ocean currents beneath West Antarctica's Pine Island Glacier Ice Shelf are eroding the ice from below, speeding the melting of the glacier as a whole, according to a new study in Nature Geoscience. A growing cavity beneath the ice shelf has allowed more warm water to melt the ice, the researchers say - a process that feeds back into the ongoing rise in global sea levels....
"More warm water from the deep ocean is entering the cavity beneath the ice shelf, and it is warmest where the ice is thickest," said study's lead author....
One goal was to study oceanic changes near the Pine Island Glacier Ice Shelf, which they had visited in an earlier expedition, in 1994. The researchers found that in 15 years, melting beneath the ice shelf had risen by about 50 percent. ...
Is it melting half-faster, or not-melting half-slower?
Tue, Jun 28, 2011 from CBC: Rapid melting of Arctic sea ice possibly explained Scientists have long puzzled over why Arctic sea ice is retreating at up to three times the rate that climate models say it should.
In an effort to answer that question, a group of U.K-based explorers walked more than 500 kilometres of sea ice in the High Arctic, taking temperature readings of the ocean below them.
They found a layer of cold, salty water about 200 metres down that they suspect has come from the melting of first-year ice.
That meltwater has forced the relatively warmer water to the surface, where it's speeding up the decay of more ice....
The report concluded that sea ice retreat is 30 years ahead of where scientists thought it would be....
Year-old ice, however, remains fairly salty. And when it melts, it produces meltwater that's denser than the relatively fresh water from older ice.
As multi-year ice declines throughout the Arctic, more of the saltier meltwater from younger ice is mixing into the ocean. That colder, denser water sinks more quickly and forces less dense water from deeper in the ocean up to the surface.Because fresh meltwater is colder than seawater, that means relatively warm water is being forced upwards. And that, said Boxall, may be part of the reason that sea ice is melting so much faster than anyone thought it would. ...
I'm so glad to understand the physics of the freight train bearing down on me.
Tue, Jun 28, 2011 from The Telegraph: Warming oceans cause largest movement of marine species in two million years Warming ocean waters are causing the largest movement of marine species seen on Earth in more than two million years, according to scientists.
In the Arctic, melting sea ice during recent summers has allowed a passage to open up from the Pacific ocean into the North Atlantic, allowing plankton, fish and even whales to into the Atlantic Ocean from the Pacific.
The discovery has sparked fears delicate marine food webs could be unbalanced and lead to some species becoming extinct as competition for food between the native species and the invaders stretches resources....
The highly venomous Portuguese Man-of-War, which is normally found in subtropical waters, is also regularly been found in the northern Atlantic waters....
"In 1999 we discovered a species in the north west Atlantic that we hadn't seen before, but we know from surveys in the north Pacific that it is very abundant there.
"This species died out in the Atlantic around 800,000 years ago due to glaciation that changed the conditions it needed to survive.
"The implications are huge. The last time there was an incursion of species from the Pacific into the Atlantic was around two to three million years ago....
"Large numbers of species were introduced from the Pacific and made large numbers of local Atlantic species extinct. ...
Sun, Jun 26, 2011 from Times-Colonist, via DesdemonaDespair: Southern dolphins pay a rare visit, add to biologists' confusion Two dolphins that would be more at home frolicking in the warm bays of southern California or Mexico are cruising the chilly waters of Puget Sound and biologists are baffled by an apparent trend for tropical species to head north....
Victoria zoologist Anna Hall, who also skippers a boat for Prince of Whales whalewatching, said the only previously recorded sighting in local waters was in April 1953 when a longbeaked common dolphin stranded itself off Victoria.
"It's really, really unusual," she said....
Another Bryde's whale stranded and died in southern Puget Sound in January 2010. Bryde's whales usually prefer tropical or warm temperate waters.
It is a mystery why tropical species are coming north, Douglas said.
"It seems there is a significant change and it's probably temperature related, but we don't know much more than that," she said. "Maybe in a year or two we will be able to say that this was the beginning of a change."
...
I bet they had a lot of SeaMiles™ they needed to use up, so they just took a vacation.
Tue, Jun 21, 2011 from NSF, via EurekAlert: Fastest sea-level rise in 2 millennia linked to increasing global temperatures he rate of sea level rise along the U.S. Atlantic coast is greater now than at any time in the past 2,000 years--and has shown a consistent link between changes in global mean surface temperature and sea level.
The findings are published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)....
The team found that sea level was relatively stable from 200 BC to 1,000 AD.
Then in the 11th century, sea level rose by about half a millimeter each year for 400 years, linked with a warm climate period known as the Medieval Climate Anomaly.
Then there was a second period of stable sea level during a cooler period called the Little Ice Age. It persisted until the late 19th century.
Since the late 19th century, sea level has risen by more than 2 millimeters per year on average, the steepest rate for more than 2,100 years.
"Sea-level rise is a potentially disastrous outcome of climate change," says Horton, "as rising temperatures melt land-based ice, and warm ocean waters." ...
It can be beautiful when the laws of physics work together.
Mon, Jun 20, 2011 from BBC: World's oceans in 'shocking' decline The oceans are in a worse state than previously suspected, according to an expert panel of scientists.
In a new report, they warn that ocean life is "at high risk of entering a phase of extinction of marine species unprecedented in human history".
They conclude that issues such as over-fishing, pollution and climate change are acting together in ways that have not previously been recognised.
The impacts, they say, are already affecting humanity....
"The findings are shocking," said Alex Rogers, IPSO's scientific director and professor of conservation biology at Oxford University.
"As we considered the cumulative effect of what humankind does to the oceans, the implications became far worse than we had individually realised.
"We've sat in one forum and spoken to each other about what we're seeing, and we've ended up with a picture showing that almost right across the board we're seeing changes that are happening faster than we'd thought, or in ways that we didn't expect to see for hundreds of years." ...
I hear Britney is showing off plenty of skin on her new "Femme Fatale" tour!
Sun, Jun 19, 2011 from Sarasota Herald-Tribune: Are jellyfish a harbinger of dying seas?
Jellyfish, common in the seas for eons, suck so up so much food -- and give back so little -- that a dramatic population increase would gravely threaten the future of oceans worldwide, according to a new study.
Jellyfish could send once-productive seas, including the Gulf of Mexico, back to a more primitive state, if theories pointing to striking increases in the gelatinous creatures prove true.
They assault the base of the food chain, creating conditions where little can survive but jellyfish and bacteria, new scientific findings published this month reveal....
The findings are a cause for concern because reports of jellyfish blooms are increasing, leading many scientists to speculate that water pollution, global warming and overfishing may be tipping the scales toward conditions more favorable for jellyfish. ...
Fri, May 13, 2011 from BBC: Wikileaks cables show race to carve up Arctic The opportunity to exploit resources has come because of a dramatic fall in the amount of ice in the Arctic.
The US Geological Survey estimates oil reserves off Greenland are as big as those in the North Sea....
Tom Burke, who advises mining company Rio Tinto and the UK Foreign Office on climate change and business, told Newsnight that political tensions were rising because "the ice is declining much faster" than expected, so "everybody who thinks they've got a chance to get at those resources wants to get in there and stake their claim".
Since the 1970s, Professor Peter Wadhams of Cambridge University has made repeated trips under the North Pole in Royal Navy nuclear submarines to measure the thickness of the ice.
He told Newsnight the graph "has gone off a cliff" because the ice sheet has thinned as well as shrunk.
The Pan-Arctic Ice-Ocean Modelling and Assimilation System (PIOMAS) which measures ice volume shows that last September there was only a quarter of the ice in the Arctic that there had been in 1979.Prof Wadhams says in summer "it could easily happen that we'll have an ice-free North Pole within a year or two". ...
Sometimes it's the offhand comments that hit the hardest.
Mon, May 2, 2011 from Reuters: African ocean current could boost Gulf Stream: study An ocean current that flows down the east coast of Africa could strengthen a circulation pattern that brings warmth to Europe, according to a new study that challenges existing climate science.
In a study in the latest issue of the journal Nature, scientists examining the Agulhas Current found more of the current's warm, salty water was entering the southern Atlantic, whose waters are cooler and fresher.
This in turn could strengthen the Gulf Stream in the Atlantic that brings warm waters and warmer temperatures to northern Europe. Until now, most studies suggest climate change would weaken the Gulf Stream over the coming decades.
In a further twist, the research team led by Lisa Beal of the University of Miami found signs that climate change had boosted the amount of water from the Agulhas current "leaking" into the south Atlantic over the past few decades....
"This could mean that current IPCC model predictions for the next century are wrong, and there will be no cooling in the North Atlantic to partially offset the effects of global climate change over North America and Europe," said Beal....
The researchers found evidence to suggest dramatic peaks in the flow of water from the Agulhas current over the past 500,000 years may have triggered the end of glacial cycles.
They also found the current had been warming since the 1960s and a general movement south of warmer Indian Ocean waters, patterns consistent with climate change.
...
Maybe we need to see the MPCC model, in which Murphy's Law is invoked.
Sun, May 1, 2011 from Bloomberg: Disaster Needed for U.S. to Act on Climate Change, Harvard's Stavins Says The U.S. probably won't take significant steps to curb climate change until an environmental disaster sways public view and prompts political action, Robert Stavins of Harvard University said.
"It's unlikely that the U.S. is going to take serious action on climate change until there are observable, dramatic events, almost catastrophic in nature, that drive public opinion and drive the political process in that direction," Stavins, director of Harvard's Environmental Economics Program in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said today in an interview in Bloomberg's Boston office....
Stavins, an economist, is a member of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which said in 2007 that scientists are more than 90 percent certain that humans are causing global warming....
"There's a legit reason for the public to be skeptical about climate change because they don't see it," Stavins said.
Grabbing the public's attention would require a dramatic development, such as a "well-observed melting of parts of polar ice caps that result in some amount of sea-level rise," Stavins said. ...
Yeah, whaddaya expect from the public, abstract thinking?
Fri, Apr 15, 2011 from NOAA: March 2011 Arctic Ice Extent Second Lowest on Record Average Arctic sea ice extent for the month of March 2011 was the second lowest in the satellite record (behind 2006), according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. The NSIDC reported that sea ice extent reached its yearly maximum on March 7. Covering an estimated 5.65 million square miles (14.64 million square kilometers), the extent tied for the lowest winter maximum extent in the satellite record.
Arctic sea ice maximum extent has decreased by 2.7 percent per decade since 1979, a much smaller decline than the 11.5 percent per decade drop in the September minimum. The relatively small decline in winter maximum extent, however, does not mean the ice is fully recovering each winter from dramatic summer melting.
Strong summer melting in the past decade has reduced the core of thick ice that manages to survive all year long. Spring ice cover has become increasingly dominated by young and generally thinner ice that formed over the previous months. Most of the thin, first-year ice melts again in the summer. ...
Which is it -- second lowest, or tied for lowest? Clearly, the scientific cabal of warmists have contradictory conclusions.
Fri, Apr 15, 2011 from BBC: Exploring the 'oceans crisis' What marked this week's event - convened by the International Programme on the State of the Ocean - as something a bit different was the melange of expertise in the same room.
Fisheries experts traded studies with people studying ocean acidification; climate modellers swapped data with ecologists; legal wonks formulated phrases alongside toxicologists.
They debated, discussed, queried, swapped questions and answers. Pretty much everyone said they'd learned something new - and something a bit scary....
It's fairly well-known now, for example, that the impacts of climate change on coral reefs can be delayed by keeping the reef healthy - by preventing local pollution, keeping fish stocks high and blocking invasive species.
So a policy to reduce climate impacts can mean curbing fishing or pollution, which might in turn mean changing farming practices to prevent fertiliser run-off.
In places, filter-feeding fish are apparently living in sediments containing so many particles of plastic that it makes up half of each mouthful. Other pollutants such as endocrine-disrupting ("gender-bending") chemicals gather on the plastic surfaces - which obviously can be harmful to the fish.
So a "healthy fisheries" policy might again involve regulating pollutants....
Josh Reichert, head of the Pew Environment Group, likening the current situation to...
"... driving towards the edge of a cliff while taking copious notes along the way.
"For years the science has gotten better, and the problem has become worse. Better science will enhance our understanding of the dilemma we face but will not resolve it - we depend on government to do that, and the challenge we face is getting government to act."
...
Tue, Apr 12, 2011 from Discovery News: Penguin, Krill Populations in Freefall Numbers of Chinstrap and Adelie penguins in the Antarctic Peninsula region have dropped by more than 50 percent in the last 30 years, driven mainly by dramatic declines in supplies of tiny, shrimp-like krill, their main prey, says a new study.
Krill, meanwhile, have declined by 40 to 80 percent, due primarily to rapidly warming temperatures in the area -- the South Shetland Islands near the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula and nearby sites.
This is one of the fastest-warming places on the planet with winter mean temperatures some 10 degrees Fahrenheit warmer now than in pre-industrial times....
The krill rely on phytoplankton growing in mats on the underside of sea ice for food at critical stages, he said.
"The young krill that are spawned in the Antarctic summer can't survive the winter without food," he said. "Once they get one year or older they can fast through the winter. We would get these long stretches of two, three or four warm, ice-free winters and there would be no survival of krill from the year before."
"We put together the pieces of the puzzle and said what's driving the penguin declines is a change in climate," he concluded. ...
Tue, Apr 5, 2011 from New Scientist: Gulf Stream could be threatened by Arctic flush Rapid warming in the Arctic is creating a new and fast-growing pool of fresh water in the Arctic Ocean. Measuring at least 7500 cubic kilometres, it could flush into the Atlantic Ocean and slow the Gulf Stream, bringing colder winters to Europe.
The water is mostly coming from melting permafrost and rising rainfall, which is increasing flows in Siberian rivers that drain into the Arctic, such as the Ob and Yenisei. More comes from melting sea ice, says Laura de Steur of the Royal Netherlands Institute of Sea Research in 't Horntje, who is tracking the build-up....
"Sea ice is melting quicker. It is thinner and more mobile, and could exit the Arctic faster. Also more of it will enter the Atlantic as liquid water rather than ice."
A dramatic freshening of the North Atlantic could disrupt the engine of a global ocean circulation system called the thermohaline circulation, or ocean conveyor. This system, of which the Gulf Stream forms a part, is driven by dense, salty water in the North Atlantic plunging to the ocean bottom near Greenland.
...
Thermohaline disruption just doesn't feel very catchy to me.
Tue, Mar 29, 2011 from Our Amazing Planet: Oceans May Be Speeding Melt of Greenland's Glaciers Dynamic layers of warm Atlantic and cold Arctic Ocean waters around Greenland may be speeding the melt of the country's glaciers, researchers find.
"Over the last 15 years or so, the Greenland Ice Sheet has been putting a lot more ice into the ocean," said Fiammetta Straneo of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, in Massachusetts, who has spent years studying the ice-coated country that is currently responsible for about a quarter of worldwide sea level rise. "We're trying to understand why, as we thought ice sheets changed on much longer timescales, like thousands of years," she told OurAmazingPlanet.
Researchers know that warm air over Greenland melts surface snow and ice, but this process doesn't do enough melting to explain the extent of the glaciers' rapid retreat. ...
Maybe the glaciers are simply recoiling from the horror!
Tue, Mar 22, 2011 from The Washington Post: King crabs invade Antarctica Sven Thatje has been predicting an invasion of deep-water crabs into shallow Antarctic waters for the past several years.
But the biologist and his colleagues got their first look at the march of the seafloor predators while riding on an icebreaker across frozen Antarctic seas this winter.
The ship towed a robot sub carrying a small digital camera that filmed the seafloor below. It caught images of bright red king crabs up to 10 inches long, moving into an undersea habitat of creatures that haven't seen sharp teeth or claws for the past 40 million years. ...
Thu, Mar 17, 2011 from Scientific American: House Repubs Vote That Earth Is Not Warming Congress has finally acted on global warming--by denying it exists. It's in the grand lawmaking tradition of the Indiana state legislature's 1897 attempt to redefine the value of pi.
The Republican-led House of Representatives is currently working on the Energy Tax Prevention Act of 2011, which would bar the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating carbon dioxide emissions to mitigate climate change.
In the House Energy and Commerce Committee, California Democrat Henry Waxman had proposed an amendment calling on Congress to at least acknowledge that "warming of the climate system is unequivocal," just as abundant scientific evidence confirms.
But on Tuesday, March 15, all the committee's Republicans voted down that amendment, as well as two others acknowledging the threat of climate change to public well-being. ...
Rep. Strangelove: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Heat.
Sun, Mar 6, 2011 from Time: Testing the Waters ...Corals build colonies that secrete calcium carbonate to form ocean reefs. When they're healthy, coral reefs provide shelter and food for animals all along the food chain, including the top: us. Across the planet, half a billion people rely, directly and indirectly, on corals for their living. That's why what happens to the 9,000-year-old Great Barrier Reef, as well as to other reefs worldwide, is critical. The recent Queensland floods were most notably tragic for the lives lost and property destroyed. But they have also hurt the Great Barrier Reef by funneling into the ocean vast plumes of freshwater and agricultural runoff that could severely damage the coral. Besides the extreme rain that sparked the floods, rising ocean temperatures, changes to the ocean's chemistry and the global trade in natural resources -- all symptoms of our fossil-fuel economy -- are waging a multifront war on the marine environment. "You can't walk into a forest and start hacking at branches and killing off animals and denuding the forest cover without killing the trees," says Justin Marshall, a marine biologist at the University of Queensland. "The outlook for the whole reef is poor."
...
This story brought to you by a mag once called TIME now called NO TIME LEFT.
Wed, Feb 23, 2011 from BBC: Coral reefs heading for fishing and climate crisis Three-quarters of the world's coral reefs are at risk due to overfishing, pollution, climate change and other factors, says a major new assessment.
Reefs at Risk Revisited collates the work of hundreds of scientists and took three years to compile.
The biggest threat is exploitative fishing, the researchers say, though most reefs will be feeling the impact of climate change within 20 years....
"The report is full of solutions - real world examples where people have succeeded to turn things around," said Dr Spalding.
"However, if we don't learn from these successes then I think that in 50 years' time, most reefs will be gone - just banks of eroding limestone, overgrown with algae and grazed by a small variety of small fish." ...
You guys are forgetting all the flooded coastal cities -- there'll be new reef areas galore!
Fri, Feb 11, 2011 from BioScience Magazine: Oyster Reefs at Risk and Recommendations for Conservation, Restoration, and Management Native oyster reefs once dominated many estuaries, ecologically and economically. Centuries of resource extraction exacerbated by coastal degradation
have pushed oyster reefs to the brink of functional extinction worldwide. We examined the condition of oyster reefs across 144 bays and 44
ecoregions; our comparisons of past with present abundances indicate that more than 90 percent of them have been lost in bays (70 percent) and ecoregions
(63 percent). In many bays, more than 99 percent of oyster reefs have been lost and are functionally extinct. Overall, we estimate that 85 percent of oyster reefs have
been lost globally. Most of the world's remaining wild capture of native oysters (greater than 75 percent) comes from just five ecoregions in North America, yet
the condition of reefs in these ecoregions is poor at best, except in the Gulf of Mexico. We identify many cost-effective solutions for conservation,
restoration, and the management of fisheries and nonnative species that could reverse these oyster losses and restore reef ecosystem services. ...
Thu, Feb 10, 2011 from NASA: January Arctic Sea Ice Extent Lowest Since Satellites During the Northern Hemisphere winter of 2010-2011, unusually cold temperatures and heavy snowstorms plagued North America and Europe, while conditions were unusually warm farther north. Now the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) has reported that Arctic sea ice was at its lowest extent ever recorded for January (since satellite records began).
NSIDC reported that ice extent was unusually low in Hudson Bay, Hudson Strait, and Davis Strait in the early winter. Normally frozen over by late November, these areas did not completely freeze until mid-January 2011. The Labrador Sea was also unusually ice-free....
Another factor in the low Arctic sea ice extent, NSIDC explained, could be that the areas of open ocean were still releasing heat to the atmosphere. Due to its bright appearance, sea ice reflects most of the Sun's light and heat back into space. Dark ocean water, by contrast, absorbs most of that energy and reinforces the melting process. ...
Wed, Feb 9, 2011 from Discovery, via DesdemonaDespair: King Crabs Invade Antarctic Waters: 'quite frightening' pace Warming waters along the Antarctic peninsula have opened the door to shell-crushing king crabs that threaten a unique ecosystem on the seafloor, according to new research by a U.S.-Sweden team of marine researchers.... marine biologists collected digital images of hundreds of crabs moving closer to the shallow coastal waters that have been protected from predators with pincers for more than 40 million years. They are the same kind of deep-water crabs with big red claws that you might find at the seafood counter....
Bottom-dwelling creatures like mussels, brittle stars and sea urchins have not developed any defenses. They have thinner shells, for example. For the same reason, filter feeders, like clams and worms, burrow underground in most regions. The lack of predators has led to a thick canopy of sorts, much like a submarine jungle comprised of flowery feather stars, tube worms and squirming sea spiders.... "The pace of changes that we are observing here in the Antarctic, which is the remotest continent on this planet, is quite frightening," he said.
What's happened is that the waters around the Antarctic peninsula have begun to get warmer. The air temperature has jumped 6 degrees Celsius (10.8 degrees Fahrenheit) since the 1950s, while the average ocean temperature has increased by 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) over the same time. ...
Get Long John Silver's and Red Lobster to work on it. Problem solved!
Thu, Feb 3, 2011 from Earth Institute, Columbia University: In the Arctic More Than Elsewhere, Things Are Heating Up Today's water temperatures are roughly 2.5 degrees F above what they were during the Medieval Warm Period, which affected the North Atlantic from about 900 - 1300 A.D. and altered the climates of Northern Europe and northern North America. The authors of the study hypothesize that this recent rise in water temperature in the Fram Strait is related to the amplification of global warming in the Arctic.... Based on their studies, the team of researchers behind the study believes that a number of recent trends (including the rapid warming of the Arctic, the loss of Arctic sea ice, and the warming of the North Atlantic) are interrelated.... Both methods demonstrated a sharp rise in the abundance of warmer-water foraminifera in the last 100 years; for the first time in 2,000 years, this species became dominant over a cold-water variety.... [A] co-author of the CU-Boulder study recently stated he feels "fairly confident that what we are seeing today is largely an anthropogenic signal." ...
I'm "fairly confident" that signal is saying STOP!
Sat, Jan 29, 2011 from Los Angeles Times: Polar bear's long swim illustrates ice melt In one of the most dramatic signs ever documented of how shrinking Arctic sea ice impacts polar bears, researchers at the U.S. Geological Survey in Alaska have tracked a female bear that swam nine days across the deep, frigid Beaufort Sea before reaching an ice floe 426 miles offshore.
The marathon swim came at a cost: With little food likely available once she arrived, the bear lost 22 percent of her body weight and her year-old female cub, who set off on the journey but did not survive, the researchers said. ...
We can only hope being "dead" might clarify the debate between "threatened" and "endangered."
Sat, Jan 29, 2011 from University of Colorado at Boulder via ScienceDaily: Warming North Atlantic Water Tied to Heating Arctic The temperatures of North Atlantic Ocean water flowing north into the Arctic Ocean adjacent to Greenland -- the warmest water in at least 2,000 years -- are likely related to the amplification of global warming in the Arctic, says a new international study involving the University of Colorado Boulder...The team believes that the rapid warming of the Arctic and recent decrease in Arctic sea ice extent are tied to the enhanced heat transfer from the North Atlantic Ocean..."Cold seawater is critical for the formation of sea ice, which helps to cool the planet by reflecting sunlight back to space..." ...
Tue, Jan 18, 2011 from PNAS, via EnvironmentalResearchWeb: Gulf Stream edging northwards along Canadian coast The Gulf Stream off eastern Canada appears to have advanced northward of its historical position in recent decades, possibly in response to anthropogenic climate change. That is according to researchers in North America and Switzerland who say that the changes could have some profound implications for marine life off the coast of Canada....
As these deep-sea corals grow new rings in their endoskeleton every year, Sherwood's team was able to determine annual variations in water composition stretching back 1800 years. According to Sherwood, one of the big challenges his team faced was collecting corals for analysis, but these were collected by remotely operated vehicles and others were supplied by the fishing industry, which accidentally scoops up corals in its nets....
Reporting their findings in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers say that the dominance of the warm Gulf waters since the early 1970s appears to be largely unique within this bimillennial period. Although Sherwood's team links these changes with recent changes in global climate, it says that further analysis is need to investigate the effects on wider ocean circulation. "These water masses do appear to have changed significantly in recent years, though I must emphasize that we have only looked at a very specific region off the coast of Nova Scotia," says Sherwood. ...
That's just the Gulf Stream wanting to check out the New Northwest Passage.
Sun, Jan 9, 2011 from canada.com: Another century of emissions will fuel 1,000 years of climate change: Study Shawn Marshall says he's not a catastrophist. The world will still be standing in the next millennium if global carbon emissions continue at their current rate for the next 100 years, says the Canada research chair in climate change, who contributed to a study released Sunday.
"I have a feeling a lot of nature will adapt and evolve to this, it's just we'll lose some stuff on the way," he said.
"I mean, we've seen pretty clearly that coral reefs can't adapt quickly, so we'll lose some of that. We'll lose some of our favourite ski areas, a number of different cities like Venice or Manhattan."
Marshall, a geography professor at the University of Calgary, recently completed work with a team of researchers from an Environment Canada research laboratory at the University of Victoria.... They found that current carbon dioxide levels will cause unstoppable effects to the climate for at least the next 1,000 years, which could cause an eventual rise of at least four metres in the global sea level by the year 3000, as well as the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet -- an area the size of Canada's prairies.
"There's no way to get around that," Marshall said. "If we get that much cumulative impact on the atmosphere and the warm water gets under the ice sheet, there's no real way out." The researchers acknowledged that it's unrealistic to think society will suddenly one day stop using fossil fuels and pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. ...
Fri, Jan 7, 2011 from Aquatic Research, via DesdemonaDespair: Ocean currents changing drastically due to global warming Examination of deep sea corals reveals that there have been drastic changes to oceanic currents in the western North Atlantic since the 1970s. The influence of the cold water Labrador Current, which is in periodic interchange with the warm Gulf Stream, has been decreasing continually since the 1970s. Occurring at the same time as Global Warming this phenomenon is unique in the past 2000 years. These results are reported by researchers from the University of Basel and Eawag in the current edition of the scientific journal PNAS.... Using new geochemical methods, an international team of researchers including the biogeochemists Prof. Moritz Lehmann (University of Basel) and Dr. Carsten Schubert (Eawag - Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology) were able to prove that a drastic change to a warm water mode occurred in the western North Atlantic in the early 1970s. This change, the timing of which coincides with and may be directly related to global warming, is unique in the last 2000 years.... The researchers were able to show a clear reduction in the 15N/14N ratio since 1970 which indicates that the role of the cold Labrador Current, with a higher 15N/14N ratio, is becoming less important. ...
Churning and churning in the shifting gyre / ocean warming will not heed the falconer / shores fall apart; the currents will not hold...
Thu, Dec 30, 2010 from NOAA, via Mongabay: Growing Atlantic dead zone shrinks habitat for billfish and tuna, may lead to over-harvest A dead zone off the coast of West Africa is reducing the amount of available habitat for Atlantic tuna and billfish species, reports the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in a study published in Fisheries Oceanography. The zone is growing due to rising water temperatures and is expected to cause over-harvest of tuna and billfish as the fish seek higher levels of oxygen in areas with greater fisheries activity.... "The hypoxic zone off West Africa, which covers virtually all the equatorial waters in the Atlantic Ocean, is roughly the size of the continental United States, and it's growing," said Dr. Eric D. Prince, a NOAA Fisheries Service research fishery biologist who led the study. "With the current cycle of climate change and accelerated global warming, we expect the size of this zone to increase, further reducing the available habitat for these fish."... Tuna and billfish - a catch-all category which includes marlin, swordfish, and sailfish species - are already experiencing global declines due to pressure from fisheries. The habitat loss caused by the dead zone is expected to push Atlantic stock down even further as fish escape to near-shore areas with more fishing activity. The increase in catch rates will make it appear that stocks are up when really they're just concentrated in a smaller area. This may lead to over-harvest. ...
Mon, Dec 20, 2010 from Nature: Newsmaker of the year: In the eye of the storm She set out to revolutionize US ocean management -- but first she faced the oil spill. Jane Lubchenco is Nature's Newsmaker of the Year. ...
Mon, Dec 20, 2010 from Associated Press: 2010's world gone wild: Quakes, floods, blizzards This was the year the Earth struck back.
Earthquakes, heat waves, floods, volcanoes, super typhoons, blizzards, landslides and droughts killed at least a quarter million people in 2010 -- the deadliest year in more than a generation. More people were killed worldwide by natural disasters this year than have been killed in terrorism attacks in the past 40 years combined.
"It just seemed like it was back-to-back and it came in waves," said Craig Fugate, who heads the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency. It handled a record number of disasters in 2010.
"The term `100-year event' really lost its meaning this year."
And we have ourselves to blame most of the time, scientists and disaster experts say.
Even though many catastrophes have the ring of random chance, the hand of man made this a particularly deadly, costly, extreme and weird year for everything from wild weather to earthquakes. ...
The hand of man is a mighty instrument of ineptitude.
Tue, Dec 14, 2010 from Plataforma SINC via ScienceDaily: Blooming Jellyfish in Northeast Atlantic and Mediterranean: Over-Fishing, Warming Waters to Blame A study examining over 50 years of jellyfish data by an international team, with the participation of the Balearic Oceanography Centre of the Spanish Institute of Oceanography (IEO) has confirmed an increase in the size and intensity of proliferations of the jellyfish Pelagia noctiluca. There are several complex reasons for this -- over-fishing and the current increase in sea water temperatures...The increase in jellyfish over the course of the year "directly" affects fisheries, fish farming and tourism "because of the jellyfishes' toxic effects and the poison in their tentacles, and because they appear particularly in the summer, having a significant socioeconomic impact," says Fernandez de Puelles. ...
Thu, Dec 9, 2010 from Ohio State, from DesdemonaDespair: Eminent Climate Scientist: Widespread Suffering If Climate Change Not Forestalled One of the world's foremost experts on climate change is warning that if humans don't moderate their use of fossil fuels, there is a real possibility that we will face the environmental, societal and economic consequences of climate change faster than we can adapt to them.... It is the first time in a published paper that he has recommended specific action to forestall the growing effects of climate change. During the last three decades, Thompson has led 57 expeditions to some of the world's most remote high altitude regions to retrieve cores from glaciers and ice caps that preserve a record of ancient climate.... "Unless large numbers of people take appropriate steps, including supporting governmental regulations aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions, our only options will be adaptation and suffering," he wrote in the concluding paragraph.
"And the longer we delay, the more unpleasant the adaptations and the greater the suffering will be."
...
Lucky for us we have experts whose lived experience, combined with scientific expertise, means they're listened to as wise elders by those with less knowledge.
Mon, Dec 6, 2010 from Yale360: Is the End in Sight for The World's Coral Reefs? You may well feel that dire predictions about anything almost always turn out to be exaggerations. You may think there may be something in it to worry about, but it won't be as bad as doomsayers like me are predicting. This view is understandable given that only a few decades ago I, myself, would have thought it ridiculous to imagine that reefs might have a limited lifespan on Earth as a consequence of human actions. It would have seemed preposterous that, for example, the Great Barrier Reef -- the biggest structure ever made by life on Earth -- could be mortally threatened by any present or foreseeable environmental change.
Yet here I am today, humbled to have spent the most productive scientific years of my life around the rich wonders of the underwater world, and utterly convinced that they will not be there for our children's children to enjoy unless we drastically change our priorities and the way we live.... In a long period of deep personal anguish, I turned to specialists in many different fields of science to find anything that might suggest a fault in my own conclusions. But in this quest I was depressingly unsuccessful.... The early stages of acidification have now been detected in the Southern Ocean and, surprisingly perhaps, in tropical corals. On our current trajectory of increasing atmospheric CO2, we can expect that by 2030 to 2050 the acidification process will be affecting all the oceans of the world to some degree.... The atmospheric levels of CO2 we are already committed to reach, no matter what mitigation is now implemented, have no equal over the entire longevity of the Great Barrier Reef, perhaps 25 million years. And most significantly, the rate of CO2 increase we are now experiencing has no precedent in all known geological history. ...
Sounds like you're expecting us to believe you, just because you've spent a lifetime studying marine science.
Mon, Nov 29, 2010 from Scientific American: Worst case study: global temp up 7.2F degrees by 2060s World temperatures could soar by 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) by the 2060s in the worst case of global climate change and require an annual investment of $270 billion just to contain rising sea levels, studies suggested on Sunday.
Such a rapid rise, within the lifetimes of many young people today, is double the 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) ceiling set by 140 governments at a U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen last year and would disrupt food and water supplies in many parts of the globe.
Rising greenhouse gas emissions this decade meant the 2 degree goal was "extremely difficult, arguably impossible, raising the likelihood of global temperature rises of 3 or 4 degrees C within this century," an international team wrote.... One of the papers gave what it called a "pragmatic estimate" that sea levels might rise by between 0.5 and 2 meters (1.64 to 6.56 feet) by 2100 if temperatures rose 4 degrees Celsius.
Containing a sea level rise of 2 meters, mostly building Dutch-style sea walls, would require annual investments of up to $270 billion a year by 2100. ...
Good news, since our worst case scenarios are much worser.
Mon, Nov 1, 2010 from BBC: Jellyfish 'may benefit from ecosystem instability' A team of researchers have been trying to identify how jellyfish may benefit from marine ecosystems destabilised by climate change and overfishing.
There is concern that a rise in jellyfish numbers could prevent depleted commercially important fish stocks recovering to historical levels.
However, a study by European scientists says more data is needed to understand what is happening beneath the waves.... In recent years, there have been a number of examples of sudden blooms of jellyfish in European waters - including the Irish, Mediterranean and Black seas - which have killed fish and closed beaches.
In 2007, an invasion of mauve stingers (Pelagia noctiluca) wiped out Northern Ireland's only salmon farm, killing more than 100,000 fish.... "It is quite a complicated set of possible linkages that need to be drawn, which we really only have a vague insight at the moment.
"For the recent period where we have good data, it appears as if sea surface temperature is the most important variable.
"This does not necessarily prove it of course, but it does appear to be benefiting jellyfish." ...
I guess "more study" is not only needed, but will be experienced.
Fri, Oct 22, 2010 from BBC: Warming destabilises freshwater aquatic ecosystems Future warming could have "profound implications" for the stability of freshwater ecosystems, a study warns.
Researchers said warmer water affected the distribution and size of plankton - tiny organisms that form the basis of food chains in aquatic systems.
The team warmed plankton-containing vessels by 4C (7F) - the temperature by which some of the world's rivers and lakes could warm over the next century.... "Essentially, what we observed within the phytoplankton (microscopic plants) community was that it switched from a system that was dominated by larger autotrophs (plants that photosynthesise) to a system that was dominated by smaller autotrophs with a lower standing biomass."
Dr Yvon-Durocher added that a greater abundance, but lower overall biomass, of smaller phytoplankton had "very important implications for the stability of plankton food webs".... "This meant that the distribution of biomass between plants and animals changed from a... situation where you had a large amount of plants and a smaller amount of animal consumers to an 'inverted pyramid' where you have a smaller quantity of plant biomass and a larger amount of animal biomass," he told BBC News. ...
I eat the food pyramid upside down. Why not the rivers?
Thu, Oct 21, 2010 from CBC: Canada's marine ecosystems face threat: report A multi-year study by the federal government has produced a troubling report card on the health of Canada's marine environments, with major changes detected in all three oceans.
Vanishing sea species, warming water temperatures and a new wave of contaminants have struck Canada's marine ecosystems, according to the document from the federal Fisheries Department.
The 38-page report was released, without fanfare, this summer....
"What we do know, from a biodiversity trend perspective, is that things have been getting worse -- much worse," said Dalhousie University's Jeff Hutchings, who reviewed a draft of the report card for Environment Canada.
"What we don't know, to be fair, is what the consequences of those reductions will always be. But we have reasonable evidence in some instances to know that they're not going to be good."...
Overfishing has caused numerous commercial fish stocks to plummet. For example, the report said that one Pacific herring stock is "at record low levels of abundance."
In the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, warming ocean temperatures have decimated ivory gull populations by more than 80 per cent since the 1980s. ...
They told me Canada would benefit from global warming.
Mon, Oct 18, 2010 from Scientific American: Melting Ice Turns 10,000 Walruses into Landlubbers The lumbering marine mammals normally spend their summers resting on the ice as it floats north, making periodic dives to the ocean floor to forage for food. But this year, as in 2007 and 2009, a lack of ice in the eastern Chukchi Sea has driven thousands of walruses to congregate on land instead.... "This is the third time in the last four years that this has happened, and we're still learning and looking for patterns," Jay said. "Anything could have happened. In 2008, there was enough ice that stayed over the [continental] shelf that they never did come ashore, but we were kind of betting the odds they would come to shore again this year."... One of their initial studies, published last week, found "a clear trend of worsening conditions" for the animals through the end of this century.
"Our biggest concern right now is stampeding," said Bruce Woods, a spokesman for the Fish and Wildlife Service's Alaska regional office. "That's the big risk posed to these animals."
That's because the intensely social -- but easily spooked -- animals have congregated in numbers that dwarf their normal groupings of up to 500 animals. ...
There's a worsening trend of evidence supporting "a clear trend of worsening conditions."
Mon, Oct 4, 2010 from PhysOrg: Climate change, overharvesting affects horseshoe crab numbers The horseshoe crab is often regarded as a living fossil, in that it has survived almost unchanged in terms of body design and lifestyle for more than 400 million years. Crabs similar to today's horseshoe crabs were walking the Earth long before the dinosaurs.
"Examining the genetic variation in populations of horseshoe crabs along the east coast of America has enabled us to track changes in population size over time," says Matthias Obst from the Department of Zoology at the University of Gothenburg, one of the authors of the study published in Molecular Ecology. "We noted a clear drop in the number of horseshoe crabs at the end of the Ice Age, a period characterised by significant global warming."
"Our results also show that future climate change may further reduce the already vastly diminished population. Normally, horseshoe crabs would have no problem coping with climate change, but the ongoing destruction of their habitats make them much more sensitive." ...
Thu, Sep 23, 2010 from NOAA: Scientists Find 20 Years of Deep Water Warming Leading to Sea Level Rise Scientists analyzing measurements taken in the deep ocean around the globe over the past two decades find a warming trend that contributes to sea level rise, especially around Antarctica.
Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, such as carbon dioxide, cause heating of the Earth. Over the past few decades, at least 80 percent of this heat energy has gone into the ocean, warming it in the process.
"Previous studies have shown that the upper ocean is warming, but our analysis determines how much additional heat the deep ocean is storing from warming observed all the way to the ocean floor," said Sarah Purkey, an oceanographer at the University of Washington and lead author of the study. This study shows that the deep ocean - below about 3,300 feet - is taking up about 16 percent of what the upper ocean is absorbing.... "A warming Earth causes sea level rise in two ways," said Gregory Johnson, a NOAA oceanographer at the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, and the study's co-author. "The warming heats the ocean, causing it to expand, and melts continental ice, adding water to the ocean. The expansion and added water both cause the sea to encroach on the land." ...
That's just the ocean giving the stressed earth a warm hug.
Wed, Sep 22, 2010 from New York Times: Extreme Heat Bleaches Coral, and Threat Is Seen This year's extreme heat is putting the world's coral reefs under such severe stress that scientists fear widespread die-offs, endangering not only the richest ecosystems in the ocean but also fisheries that feed millions of people. From Thailand to Texas, corals are reacting to the heat stress by bleaching, or shedding their color and going into survival mode. Many have already died, and more are expected to do so in coming months. Computer forecasts of water temperature suggest that corals in the Caribbean may undergo drastic bleaching in the next few weeks. ...
Tue, Sep 21, 2010 from CBC: Northwest Passage traffic up in 2010 The number of ships travelling through the Northwest Passage has doubled this year, prompting at least one Arctic sovereignty expert to call for more enforcement in the increasingly ice-free Arctic waterway.
The Canada Border Services Agency says 18 ships have cleared customs in Inuvik, N.W.T. -- at the western end of the Northwest Passage -- so far this year, and the navigation season is not even over yet. By comparison, only seven ships cleared customs there in 2009, according to the agency.
"It is a little bit tricky -- lots of fog and ice," Börje Ivarsson, a Swedish adventurer who just finished a two-year journey from Russia to Inuvik on a 30-foot boat, told CBC News.
"It's quite a shortcut if you're living in the north of Europe to get over to Alaska," Ivarsson said of the Northwest Passage. "It's a good adventure, too."
The increase in marine traffic is largely a result of climate change opening up the passage, said Rob Huebert, the associate director for the Centre for Military and Strategic Studies at the University of Calgary.
Huebert said many people have talked about the Northwest Passage's potential for years, and now it's starting to happen.
"I think that we'll often go back to 2010 and say that was the turning point, that was the time when it turned from theory to actuality," he said.
...
I wonder what we'll call the point that was once the North Pole, when we're sailing through it.
Mon, Sep 20, 2010 from The Independent: Shucks!: Why British oysters are off the menu Yet, after all that, the British oyster industry is now teetering on the brink of a new crisis. A new virus, which has never before been seen in Britain, has wiped out more than eight million oysters at a farm in Whitstable. The OsHV-1 virus is, ironically enough for a disease which attacks a foodstuff that has for centuries been regarded as an aphrodisiac, a form of herpes.... Though the disease has no effect on humans, it has an 80 per cent death-rate among oysters and no known cure. "It is catastrophic," according to John Bayes, who runs a farm at the centre of the infected area, Seasalter Shellfish, which last year produced 14,000 tons of oysters worth £30m. He fears a "total wipe-out" of the significant investment he has made in seeding new oyster beds.... "All living organisms have herpes, some people say, but it only presents itself when they are in poor condition," says Richard Green.... "It's quite different from salmon farming where you introduce intensive amounts of feed and antibiotics into the water. All oysters need is good clean water. An oyster is only as good as the water in which it grows. An oyster is a barometer of water quality." ...
Sat, Sep 11, 2010 from EnvironmentalResearchWeb: A sea of troubles This year has been a tough one for the world's oceans. Sea-surface temperatures have continued to rise, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill caused serious pollution, as did numerous smaller leaks, and over-fishing and acidification continue apace.
So it's no surprise that ocean life, from the smallest plankton to the largest whale, is showing signs of damage. Only this week the US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration designated the eastern North Pacific basking shark a "species of concern" because of the dramatic drop in its numbers despite years of protection from fishing.... And earlier this summer researchers in Canada found that the amount of phytoplankton in the ocean has decreased by 40 percent since 1950 in 8 out of 10 large ocean regions. They ascribed this decline to rising sea-surface temperatures, but added that there may be other factors that they haven't yet discovered. ...
Fri, Sep 10, 2010 from Planet Green / Discovery: More Than Half of Penguin Species are Under Threat More than 180 scientists and government officials have recently gathered in Boston for the 7th International Penguin Conference. The conclusions of the conference are rather alarming: the scientists warn that 10 of the 18 penguin species are experiencing population decline and that a variety of things are threatening their long-term survival, with some of these species facing extinction by the end of the 21st century.
Four main factors are threatening penguins. The first is over-fishing: Because of the rapid increase in fishing operations in the past decades, penguins are now competing with us for food, and our industrial fishing fleets are simply more effective at catching fish. "The large scale harvesting of anchovy and sardine stocks have directly reduced the prey available to many penguin species including Macaroni and Chinstrap penguins in the South Atlantic" Thousands of penguins are also killed when they are caught in fishing nets.
The second factor is climate change: Many penguin species are highly dependent on small schooling fish for food. The changing climate can affect the migratory patterns of these fish, making it harder for penguins to find food.... ...
Mon, Aug 30, 2010 from PhysOrg: Climate change implicated in decline of horseshoe crabs While the current decline in horseshoe crabs is attributed in great part to overharvest for fishing bait and for the pharmaceutical industry, the new research indicates that climate change also appears to have historically played a role in altering the numbers of successfully reproducing horseshoe crabs. More importantly, said King, predicted future climate change, with its accompanying sea-level rise and water temperature fluctuations, may well limit horseshoe crab distribution and interbreeding, resulting in distributional changes and localized and regional population declines, such as happened after the last Ice Age.... "Population size decreases of these ancient mariners have implications beyond the obvious," King said. "Genetic diversity is the most fundamental level of biodiversity, providing the raw material for evolutionary processes to act upon and affording populations the opportunity to adapt to their surroundings. For this reason, the low effective population sizes indicated in the new study give one pause." ...
Sat, Aug 28, 2010 from New York Times: Pacific Hot Spells Shifting as Predicted in Human-Heated World Federal researchers have published work concluding that a particular variant of the periodic El Niño warmups of the tropical Pacific Ocean is becoming more frequent and stronger. The pattern appears to fit what is expected from human-driven warming of the global climate, said the researchers, Tong Lee of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Michael McPhaden of the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration....
"The two threads of evidence together-from data and from computer models--suggest that climate change is affecting El Nino, rather than a natural variation in El Nino causing trends that may appear as if they are the result of man-made climate change. We can't be 100 percent certain that this interpretation is correct because the data are limited and the models are imperfect. But it provides us a plausible working hypothesis for further investigation into the nature and impacts of a changing face to El Nino."... "To add to that, some folks have suggested the possibility of natural variability in causing the warming (for example, we just happen to capture the rising part of a 60-year natural cycle). While that is possible, the so-called Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) index that is used to characterize decadal and multi-decadal variability of the Pacific Ocean has not shown a significant increasing or decreasing three-decade trend from the 1980's to the 2000's (it's dominated by quasi-decadal fluctuation since 1980). So it's difficult to blame the El Niño change to PDO." ...
Can't blame El Nino, can't blame PDO. Why isn't science doing its job?
Fri, Aug 27, 2010 from CBC: Pursuing the mystery herring loss near Nova Scotia Scientists from the Bedford Institute of Oceanography are on a mission to find out why herring fishermen in Nova Scotia are reporting fewer and smaller fish this season.
The researchers are using sounders and sonars to count the number of herring in an area known as the German Bank, off the southwestern coast of Nova Scotia.
The count may help explain why the catches have been coming up smaller this year.
"When the fishermen don't land fish, people think that there may not be fish," said Gary Melvin, a research scientist. "There can actually be fish. But we want to be sure, one way or the other."
Some fishermen said they believe the catches are smaller because the fish are avoiding warmer water temperatures near the surface and diving deeper, thereby eluding the large nets used to catch them.
...
Avoiding warmer temperatures would be a smart survival strategy.
Thu, Aug 26, 2010 from CBC: Huge ice chunk breaks off Ellesmere Island A large parcel of ice has fractured from a massive ice shelf on Ellesmere Island in Nunavut, marking the third known case of Arctic ice loss this summer alone.
The chunk of ice, which scientists estimate is roughly the size of Bermuda, broke away from the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf on the island's northern coast around Aug. 18, according to NASA satellite imagery.
At 40 metres thick, the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf is estimated to be 3,000 to 5,000 years old, jutting off the island like an extension of the land.
"The cracks are going right to the mainland, basically, right to Ellesmere Island," John England, a professor of earth and atmospheric sciences with the University of Alberta, told CBC News on Tuesday. "So, in the core of the ice shelf itself, the fracturing is occurring.
"I think that's really quite significant, that it's like the most resistant and most tenacious part of the ice shelf is now being dismantled."...
England said there is still a month to go in the summer ice loss season in the Arctic Ocean, raising the possibility that other parts of the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf -- particularly on the eastern side -- could easily break off.
...
It's those eco-nazi terrorists, blowing ice up to convince us that the greenhouse thing is real.
Tue, Aug 24, 2010 from PNAS, via Scientific American: All-out geoengineering still would not stop sea level rise Mimicking volcanoes by throwing particles high into the sky. Maintaining a floating armada of mirrors in space. Burning plant and other organic waste to make charcoal and burying it--or burning it as fuel and burying the CO2 emissions. Even replanting trees. All have been mooted as potential methods of "geoengineering"--"deliberate large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment," as the U.K.'s Royal Society puts it.... Arguably a more devastating consequence would be the rise of the seas as warmer waters expand and melting icecaps fill ocean basins higher, potentially swamping nations and the estimated 150 million people living within one meter of high tide. Can geoengineering hold back that tide?
That's what scientists attempted to assess with computer models in a paper published online August 23 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In their words, "sea level rise by 2100 will likely be 30 centimeters higher than 2000 levels despite all but the most aggressive geoengineeering." In large part, that's because the ocean has a lot of thermal inertia: it only slowly warms as a result of increasing greenhouse gas levels--and it will only slowly cool down again.... Perhaps the only way to reduce warming enough to minimize the rise of the oceans is an all-out effort that also includes burning biomass as fuel (either to replace coal or gasoline or both) and pairing it with CO2 capture and storage. Together, they could suck down greenhouse gas levels by 180 ppm--more than enough to bring us below pre-industrial levels. As a result, sea level rise is held to just 10 centimers by 2100, according to the author's modeling.
Such extensive geoengineering seems impractical given its economic (and environmental) cost. ...
We can't just build an armada of floating refrigerators?
Thu, Aug 19, 2010 from Climatewire: Pakistan -- a Sad New Benchmark in Climate-Related Disasters Devastating flooding that has swamped one-fifth of Pakistan and left millions homeless is likely the worst natural disaster to date attributable to climate change, U.N. officials and climatologists are now openly saying. Most experts are still cautioning against tying any specific event directly to emissions of greenhouse gases. But scientists at the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in Geneva say there's no doubt that higher Atlantic Ocean temperatures contributed to the disaster begun late last month.
Atmospheric anomalies that led to the floods are also directly related to the same weather phenomena that a caused the record heat wave in Russia and flooding and mudslides in western China... ...
Better to be "sad" about climate change than terrified.
Tue, Aug 17, 2010 from PhysOrg: Massive coral mortality following bleaching in Indonesia The Wildlife Conservation Society today released initial field observations that indicate that a dramatic rise in the surface temperature in Indonesian waters has resulted in a large-scale bleaching event that has devastated coral populations. WCS's Indonesia Program "Rapid Response Unit" of marine biologists was dispatched to investigate coral bleaching reported in May in Aceh-a province of Indonesia-located on the northern tip of the island of Sumatra. The initial survey carried out by the team revealed that over 60 percent of corals were bleached.... Depending on many factors, bleached coral may recover over time or die.
Subsequent monitoring conducted by marine ecologists ... found that 80 percent of some species have died since the initial assessment and more colonies are expected to die within the next few months.... According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Coral Hotspots website, temperatures in the region peaked in late May of 2010, when the temperature reached 34 degrees Celsius--4 degrees Celsius [7 degrees F] higher than long term averages for the area.... "If a similar degree of mortality is apparent at other sites in the Andaman Sea this will be the worst bleaching event ever recorded in the region.... The destruction of these upstream reefs means recovery is likely to take much longer than before". ...
Mon, Aug 9, 2010 from Yale360: A Looming Oxygen Crisis and Its Impact on World's Oceans As serious as these dead zones are, however, they may be just a foreshadowing of a much more severe crisis to come. Agricultural runoff can only strip oxygen from the ocean around the mouths of fertilizer-rich rivers. But global warming has the potential to reduce the ocean's oxygen content across the entire planet. Combined with acidification -- another global impact of our carbon emissions -- the loss of oxygen could have a major impact on marine life.
Scientists point to two reasons to expect a worldwide drop in ocean oxygen. One is the simple fact that as water gets warmer, it can hold less dissolved oxygen. The other reason is subtler. The entire ocean gets its oxygen from the surface -- either from the atmosphere, or from photosynthesizing algae floating at the top of the sea. The oxygen then spreads to the deep ocean as the surface waters slowly sink.
Global warming is expected to reduce the mixing of the ocean by making surface seawater lighter.... more of the oxygen will linger near the surface, where it will be used up by oxygen-breathing organisms. ...
First it's CO2. Now it's O2. C'mon, science, make up your mind.
Wed, Aug 4, 2010 from Telegraph.co.uk: What Lies Beneath The Sea: Census of Marine Life The Census of Marine Life also points to the effect of so-called "alien species" being found in many of the world's marine ecosystems. The Mediterranean has the largest number of invasive species - most of them having migrated through the Suez Canal from the Red Sea. So far, more than 600 invasive species have been counted, almost 5 per cent of the total marine creatures in the Mediterranean.
Those annoying jellyfish on the Spanish holiday beaches may be sending us a message, or at least a warning. In recent years there have been other jellyfish "invasions". In 2007, 100,000 fish at Northern Ireland's only salmon farm were killed by the same "mauve stingers" that are affecting the Spanish beaches. The swarming jellies covered 10 square miles of water.
In 2005, and again last year, Japanese fishermen battled swarms of giant Nomura jellyfish, each measuring six feet across and weighing 200kg. Once seen infrequently, they now regularly swarm across the Yellow Sea, making it impossible for Japanese boats to deploy their nets. One fishing boat capsized after the jellyfish became entangled in its nets.
There is evidence that the global jellyfish invasion is gathering pace. As Mediterranean turtles lose their nesting sites to beach developments, or die in fishing nets, and the vanishing population of other large predators such as bluefin tuna are fished out, their prey is doing what nature does best: filling a void. Smaller, more numerous species like the jellyfish are flourishing and plugging the gap left by animals higher up the food chain. According to the Spanish environment ministry: "Jellyfish blooms have been increasing in recent years, and one of the suggested causes is the decline in natural predators - as well as climate change and pollution from land-based sources." ...
I'm so happy that I can choose to believe that our actions don't have consequences.
Mon, Aug 2, 2010 from University of Georgia, via EurekAlert: Ice-free ocean may not absorb CO2 Scientists have been looking at ways the Earth might benefit from natural processes to balance the rising heat, and one process had intrigued them, a premise that melting ice at the poles might allow more open water that could absorb carbon dioxide, one of the major compounds implicating in warming.
Now, though, in research just published in the journal Science and led by a University of Georgia biogeochemist, that idea may be one more dead end. In fact, a survey of waters in the Canada Basin, which extends north of Alaska to the North Pole, shows that its value as a potential carbon dioxide "sink" may be short-lived at best and minor in terms of what the planet will need to avoid future problems.... "But our research shows that as the ice melts, the carbon dioxide in the water very quickly reaches equilibrium with the atmosphere, so its use as a place to store CO2 declines dramatically and quickly. We never really understood how limited these waters would be in terms of their usefulness in soaking up carbon dioxide."... And because of this carbon dioxide uptake, the waters become quite acidic and "a poor environment for calcium-carbonate shell-bearing marine organisms," Cai said. ...
I'm not sure how a cul-de-sac can be composed of so many dead ends.
Fri, Jul 30, 2010 from LiveScience, via DesdemonaDespair: Oceans May Be Primed for Mass Extinction The Gulf and the rest of the world's waters also face the uncertain and potentially devastating effects of climate change. Warming ocean temperatures reduce the water's oxygen content, and rising atmospheric carbon dioxide is altering the basic chemistry of the ocean, making it more acidic. There is no shortage of evidence that both of these effects have begun to wreak havoc on certain important creatures.... "Today the synergistic effects of human impacts are laying the groundwork for a comparably great Anthropocene mass extinction in the oceans, with unknown ecological and evolutionary consequences...". When it comes to the oceans, research shows a parallel to the Permian-Triassic extinction -- also known as the Great Dying -- which eradicated 95 percent of marine species when the oceans lost their oxygen about 250 million years ago.
The same phenomenon is taking place in many areas of today's oceans.... "If current trends continue, the extinctions of the coming decades will be clearly visible to future geologists comparable in scale to the great extinction events in Earth's history," he wrote. "I think it will be an enigmatic extinction. Future geologists will try to figure out why we apparently tried to kill off so many species, but they will find it hard to believe that simple reason is stupidity." ...
It's not that we're stupid. It's that we know we're the king of the world.
Thu, Jul 29, 2010 from New Scientist: Phytoplankton [and more] in decline: bye bye food chain Ocean life is being wiped out from the bottom up. The global population of microscopic plants that float in ocean water and support most marine life has declined by 1 per cent every year since 1899.... Whatever the cause, it's a remarkably bad piece of news, because although phytoplankton are neither glamorous nor cute, the entire ocean food chain depends on them.... [Corals] are threatened by changing ocean temperatures and ocean acidification, both triggered by humanity's greenhouse gas emissions.
[Key saproxylic beetles in] Europe, at least, 24 per cent are under threat, and we would miss them if they went.
Similarly, insects such as butterflies and bees that pollinate plants are probably in decline (though the data are far from complete).
And fungi have barely been assessed at all, but along with bacteria they are the organisms that do the lion's share of decomposition, which is whiffy but essential.
In other words, never mind the pandas: it's plankton, bugs and fungi you should be worrying about. ...
Wed, Jul 28, 2010 from Dalhousie University via ScienceDaily: Marine Phytoplankton Declining: Striking Global Changes at the Base of the Marine Food Web Linked to Rising Ocean Temperatures A new article published in the 29 July issue of the journal Nature reveals for the first time that microscopic marine algae known as "phytoplankton" have been declining globally over the 20th century. Phytoplankton forms the basis of the marine food chain and sustains diverse assemblages of species ranging from tiny zooplankton to large marine mammals, seabirds, and fish. Says lead author Daniel Boyce, "Phytoplankton is the fuel on which marine ecosystems run. A decline of phytoplankton affects everything up the food chain, including humans."... documented phytoplankton declines of about 1 percent of the global average per year. This trend is particularly well documented in the Northern Hemisphere and after 1950, and would translate into a decline of approximately 40 percent since 1950.The scientists found that long-term phytoplankton declines were negatively correlated with rising sea surface temperatures and changing oceanographic conditions. ...
Does this mean I won't be able to get my Phytoplankton Krispies?
Thu, Jul 22, 2010 from New Scientist: Record-breaking heat does not 'prove' global warming After very cold winter weather in many parts of the northern hemisphere, the notion of global warming was ripe for mockery. The family of senator Jim Inhofe - who called global warming "a hoax", built an igloo in Washington DC, with a sign saying "Al Gore's new home".
And now? The winter weather has given way to a series of extraordinary heatwaves....
According to meteorologist Jeff Masters, nine countries have recorded their hottest ever temperatures this year, from the 53.5 degrees C recorded on 26 May in Pakistan to the 44 degrees C recorded in Russia on 11 July.
If these records are officially confirmed, it will mean more national heat records been set in one year than ever before. So should "global warmists" be crowing about how this record-breaking heat proves they were right all along?
No: the record-breaking heat does not "prove" global warming.... According to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, for instance, June was the fourth consecutive warmest month on record. According to NASA, the average temperature over the past 12 months has been the hottest ever.... But the latest El Niño was not as especially strong. What's more, we are currently getting less heat from the sun than we have for decades. This means that it's the combination of a strong underlying global warming trend due to rising carbon dioxide, together with a moderate El Nino, that explains why the planet is so hot at the moment. ...
What's good enough for the gander is good enough for the cooked goose.
Thu, Jul 22, 2010 from Telegraph.co.uk: Malaysia closes diving reefs to try to save dying coral Twelve reefs that attract half a million tourists from around the world annually are now closed to divers and snorkellers until the end of October to allow the corals to recover from bleaching caused by warmer seas.
Abdul Jamal Mydin, director general of the Department of Marine Parks, said that the temperature of the seas has risen to 88 degrees F (31C) in recent months, up 4 degrees F (2 degrees C) from the normal level. Up to 90 per cent of the coral has started to turn white meaning it is dying off, threatening the delicate ecosystem. ...
Mon, Jul 19, 2010 from London Daily Telegraph: Coral reefs suffer mass bleaching The phenomenon, known as coral bleaching because the reefs turn bone white when the colourful algae that give the coral its colour and food is lost, has been reported throughout south east Asia, the Indian Ocean and the Pacific.
Divers and scientists have described huge areas of previously pristine reef being turned into barren white undersea landscapes off the coast of Thailand and Indonesia. The popular island tourist destination the Maldives have also suffered severe bleaching. Reefs in the Caribbean could also be under threat.
High ocean temperatures this year are being blamed for the bleaching, which experts fear could be worse than a similar event in 1998 which saw an estimated 16 per cent of the world's reefs being destroyed. ...
Thu, Jul 8, 2010 from London Guardian: China launches armada to head off algae plume Chinese authorities have dispatched a flotilla of more than 60 ships to head off a massive tide of algae that is approaching the coast of Qingdao.
The outbreak is thought to be caused by high ocean temperatures and excess nitrogen runoff from agriculture and fish farms.
Scientists involved in the operation say the seaweed known as enteromorpha needs to be cleaned up before it decomposes on beaches and releases noxious gases.
According to the domestic media, the green tide covers an area of 400 sq km. Newspapers ran pictures of coastguard officials raking up the gunk as soon as it reached the shore.
As well as the 66 vessels sent to intercept the approaching algae, a net has been stretched offshore as an extra defence. Ten forklift trucks, seven lorries and 168 people were clearing up the many tonnes of seaweed that still got through. ...
Mon, Jul 5, 2010 from Science, via McClatchy: World ocean: 'overwhelming evidence' that it's 'a lot worse than the public thinks.' A sobering new report warns that the oceans face a "fundamental and irreversible ecological transformation" not seen in millions of years as greenhouse gases and climate change already have affected temperature, acidity, sea and oxygen levels, the food chain and possibly major currents that could alter global weather.... "We are becoming increasingly certain that the world's marine ecosystems are reaching tipping points," Bruno said, adding, "We really have no power or model to foresee" the impact.
"It's a lot worse than the public thinks," said Nate Mantua, an associate research professor at the University of Washington's Climate Impacts Group.
Mantua, who's read the report, said it was clear what was causing the oceans' problems: greenhouse gases. "It is not a mystery," he said.
...
Alright! If it's not a mystery, then we can do something about it!
Right?
Right?
Sun, Jul 4, 2010 from The Smithsonian Magazine: Jellyfish: The Next King of the Sea All around the world, jellyfish are behaving badly--reproducing in astonishing numbers and congregating where they've supposedly never been seen before. Jellyfish have halted seafloor diamond mining off the coast of Namibia by gumming up sediment-removal systems. Jellies scarf so much food in the Caspian Sea they're contributing to the commercial extinction of beluga sturgeon--the source of fine caviar. In 2007, mauve stinger jellyfish stung and asphyxiated more than 100,000 farmed salmon off the coast of Ireland as aquaculturists on a boat watched in horror. The jelly swarm reportedly was 35 feet deep and covered ten square miles.
Nightmarish accounts of "Jellyfish Gone Wild," as a 2008 National Science Foundation report called the phenomenon, stretch from the fjords of Norway to the resorts of Thailand...Nobody knows exactly what's behind it, but there's a queasy sense among scientists that jellyfish just might be avengers from the deep, repaying all the insults we've heaped on the world's oceans....
At 39 degrees Fahrenheit, the polyps generated, on average, about 20 teeny jellyfish. At 46 degrees, roughly 40. The polyps in 54-degree seawater birthed some 50 jellies each, and one made 69. “A new record,” Widmer says, awed.
...
Just when you thought it was safe to get back in the water.
Tue, Jun 29, 2010 from Independent (Ireland): Our warmer waters attract new species Ireland's coastal waters are getting warmer and waves are getting higher because of climate change.
Swarms of jellyfish are now being enticed to the warmer water, a new climate change report published today reveals.
The report, 'Irish Ocean Climate and Ecosystem Status Report 2009', details a number of significant changes recorded in recent years including increases in sea surface temperature.
Higher temperatures have led to an increase in the number of warm water species in Irish waters, ranging from microscopic plankton to swarms of jellyfish.
A key finding of the report, published by the Marine Institute, is that increases of sea surface temperature of 0.6C per decade have been taking place since 1994 -- a change unprecedented in the past 150 years.
This, in turn, is linked to an increase in microscopic plants and animals, along with species of jellyfish.
Further up the food chain, greater numbers of warm-water fish species have been observed in Irish waters, along with sightings of exotic species such as snake pipefish.
Declines in the number of seabirds have also been observed, which may be linked to climate change, says the report. ...
Mon, Jun 28, 2010 from SolveClimate: On Arctic Research Voyage, Scientists Have Many Words for Ice Every two hours, a watcher enters information about the ice status into a computer, noting the ship's location and activity (such as transiting toward a station), along with the coverage and appearance of ice.
Just as the French have many words for love, ice scientists have many ways of describing ice.
If you're looking at ice that came from a glacier, you might see formations known as growlers, blocky growlers, bergs, bergy bits, and wedged bergy bits, among others. The ice that forms at sea, such as we're seeing here in the Chukchi, comes in pancakes, ice cakes, belts, strips, and floes ranging in size from small to giant. The computerized form that Don and the other Ice Watchers use was designed for the Antarctic, but was adapted for Arctic use during the International Polar Year, in an effort to create a common language among ice scientists.... "I'm a bit biased, but I would say sea ice decline is one of the most profound, climatic impacts that are changing in our life time. Many of the models that are out there right now say that perennial sea ice will be absolutely gone in 30 years. Thirty years! That's not your grandkids or your great grandkids. That's our lifetime! What are the biological ramifications of that? What are the biogeochemical ramifications of that? What are the feedbacks that are going to ensue, and how is the biology going to change?" ...
I just hope those words refer to something real, come 2020.
Tue, Jun 22, 2010 from via DesdemonaDespair: As world prices peak, Vietnam runs out of shrimp to sell Shrimp prices have spiked since the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, but Mekong Delta production is at a cyclical low.
CEO Le Van Quang of Minh Phu Seafood Company says there's been a surge in demand by US shrimp importers since the oil spill disaster cratered Gulf of Mexico production. Prices offered for black tiger shrimp have reached $13 per kilo, an increase of 30 percent over 2009 levels and the highest price seen in ten years.
Hot weather and decreased production in competing countries are also pushing prices up. An epidemic has killed 80 percent of Indonesia's farmed shrimp, and 20 percent in Thailand and Malaysia. Production is down in India and Bangladesh too.
Seafood companies say that they are missing fat profits because demand has outstripped supply.... Khuan says his company is scouring Ca Mau and Bac Lieu province for more shrimp. It has only been able to buy 40 tonnes per day, though the factory can process and pack 120 tonnes per day. ...
I bet the "scouring" will increase next season's harvest!
Sun, Jun 20, 2010 from Scientific American: Oceans choking on CO2, face deadly changes: study The world's oceans are virtually choking on rising greenhouse gases, destroying marine ecosystems and breaking down the food chain -- irreversible changes that have not occurred for several million years, a new study says.
The changes could have dire consequences for hundreds of millions of people around the globe who rely on oceans for their livelihoods."It's as if the Earth has been smoking two packs of cigarettes a day", said the report's lead-author Australian marine scientist Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg. The Australia-U.S. report published in Science magazine on Friday, studied 10 years of marine research and found that climate change was causing major declines in marine ecosystems. Oceans were rapidly warming and acidifying, water circulation was being altered and dead zones within the ocean depths were expanding, said the report.
There has also been a decline in major ocean ecosystems like kelp forests and coral reefs and the marine food chain was breaking down, with fewer and smaller fish and more frequent diseases and pests among marine organisms. ...
I've been told that the four out of five doctors smoke Chesterfields.
Tue, Jun 15, 2010 from Cape Cod Times, from DesdemonaDespair: Cape lobster industry faces crisis In what could be the first major economic blow to local fisheries pinned on global warming, regulators are contemplating shutting down the lobster industry from Buzzards Bay to Long Island Sound for five years due to a drastic population drop brought on by temperature changes of just a few degrees in inshore waters.
Lobstermen south of Cape Cod have seen their catches nosedive for the past decade, from more than 20 million pounds in 1997 to less than 5 million last year. In the past, overfishing, water pollution, pesticides and an outbreak of shell disease were blamed for the failure of the fishery.
But tough fishing regulations have done nothing to reverse the trend, and some scientists now believe water temperature may be the primary obstacle to recovery.... It's called trophic shift -- when the environment changes so dramatically that the least tolerant resident species move out, and ones more adapted to live under those new conditions move in. ...
Fri, Apr 23, 2010 from McClatchy Newspapers: Report: Ocean acidification rising at unprecedented rate With the oceans absorbing more than 1 million tons of carbon dioxide an hour, a National Research Council study released Thursday found that the level of acid in the oceans is increasing at an unprecedented rate and threatening to change marine ecosystems.
The council said the oceans were 30 percent more acidic than they were before the Industrial Revolution started roughly 200 years ago, and the oceans absorb one-third of today's carbon dioxide emissions.
Unless emissions are reined in, ocean acidity could increase by 200 percent by the end of the century and even more in the next century, said James Barry, a senior scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California and one of the study's authors... Also testifying was actress Sigourney Weaver, who made passing references to her roles in "Alien" and "Avatar" while urging Congress to pass global climate change legislation. ...
She did not, however, make any reference to her role in Tadpole.
Mon, Apr 19, 2010 from Environmental Research Web: Where has all the heat gone? In a commentary in today's issue of Science, Kevin Trenberth and John Fasullo of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, US, identify a large and growing amount of solar energy that appears to have been absorbed by the Earth - but has yet to turn up in terrestrial measurements.... Trenberth told physicsworld.com that the discrepancy probably lies in the environment's largest heat reservoir. "I would say that the missing heat is mainly in the ocean," he argues.... Scientists already know the Southern Oscillation involves the absorption of solar energy by the Pacific Ocean during "La Nina" years and its release into the atmosphere during "El Nino" years - leading to significant changes in weather patterns in the Americas.
An El Nino began in 2009 and looks set to continue in 2010. Trenberth believes that it might result in much of the missing energy resurfacing - but adds that current data gathering and analysis techniques mean that it could be a year or two before we know. "One can argue that we should develop a system to do this in closer to real time as part of the new climate services," he said. ...
Fri, Apr 16, 2010 from National Center for Atmospheric Research/University Corporation for Atmospheric Research: 'Missing' Heat May Affect Future Climate Change Current observational tools cannot account for roughly half of the heat that is believed to have built up on Earth in recent years, according to a "Perspectives" article in this week's issue of Science. Scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) warn in the new study that satellite sensors, ocean floats, and other instruments are inadequate to track this "missing" heat, which may be building up in the deep oceans or elsewhere in the climate system. "The heat will come back to haunt us sooner or later," says NCAR scientist Kevin Trenberth, the lead author...Whereas satellite instruments indicate that greenhouse gases are continuing to trap more solar energy, or heat, scientists since 2003 have been unable to determine where much of that heat is going.
Either the satellite observations are incorrect, says Trenberth, or, more likely, large amounts of heat are penetrating to regions that are not adequately measured, such as the deepest parts of the oceans. Compounding the problem, Earth's surface temperatures have largely leveled off in recent years. Yet melting glaciers and Arctic sea ice, along with rising sea levels, indicate that heat is continuing to have profound effects on the planet. ...
Perhaps that heat we can't account for is being sequestered in skeptics.
Mon, Apr 5, 2010 from McClatchy Newspapers: EPA may try to use Clean Water Act to regulate carbon dioxide The Environmental Protection Agency is exploring whether to use the Clean Water Act to control greenhouse gas emissions, which are turning the oceans acidic at a rate that's alarmed some scientists.
With climate change legislation stalled in Congress, the Clean Water Act would serve as a second front, as the Obama administration has sought to use the Clean Air Act to rein in emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases administratively.
Since the dawn of the industrial age, acid levels in the oceans have increased 30 percent. Currently, the oceans are absorbing 22 million tons of carbon dioxide a day.
Among other things, scientists worry that the increase in acidity could interrupt the delicate marine food chain, which ranges from microscopic plankton to whales.
...
Sat, Mar 27, 2010 from ENS Newswire, via DesdemonaDespair: Worst Ice Year on Record Kills Canadian Seals Before Hunters Can Thousands of harp seal pups are presumed dead in Canada's Gulf of St. Lawrence and starving pups are being found abandoned on the beaches of Prince Edward Island, victims of the worst ice conditions ever recorded in the region.
Environment Canada said March 16 that ice conditions in the Gulf were the lowest in the 41 years it has kept records.
Off Newfoundland, Canada's other seal hunting ground, ice has formed only off the Northern Peninsula when, by now, it has usually extended along the island's northeast coast.... "The conditions this year are disastrous for seal pups. I've surveyed this region for nine years and have never seen anything like this," said Sheryl Fink, a senior researcher with IFAW.
"There is wide open water instead of the usual ice floes, and rather than the hundreds of thousands of seal pups that we normally encounter, only a handful of baby harp and hooded seals, animals that are normally found on ice, remain on the beaches," she said. ...
The Canadian government, however, knows better: it increased the quota on harp seals last week.
Wed, Mar 24, 2010 from AP, via PhysOrg.com: Disputed isle in Bay of Bengal disappears into sea For nearly 30 years, India and Bangladesh have argued over control of a tiny rock island in the Bay of Bengal. Now rising sea levels have resolved the dispute for them: the island's gone. New Moore Island in the Sunderbans has been completely submerged, said oceanographer Sugata Hazra, a professor at Jadavpur University in Calcutta. Its disappearance has been confirmed by satellite imagery and sea patrols, he said.
"What these two countries could not achieve from years of talking, has been resolved by global warming," said Hazra.
Scientists at the School of Oceanographic Studies at the university have noted an alarming increase in the rate at which sea levels have risen over the past decade in the Bay of Bengal.
Until 2000, the sea levels rose about 3 millimeters (0.12 inches) a year, but over the last decade they have been rising about 5 millimeters (0.2 inches) annually, he said. ...
Who would have expected nature to help us resolve our political differences?
Thu, Mar 18, 2010 from NOAA, via DesdemonaDespair: February 2010 had 2nd-hottest oceans on record, following hottest January # For the year to date, the combined global land and ocean surface temperature of 12.7°C (54.9°F) was the fifth warmest January-February period on record. This value is 0.60°C (1.08°F) above the 20th century average.
# The worldwide ocean surface temperature for February 2010 was the second warmest on record for February, 0.54°C (0.97°F) above the 20th century average of 15.9°C (60.6°F).
# The seasonal (December 2009 - February 2010) worldwide ocean surface temperature was also the second warmest on record, 0.54°C (0.97°F) above the 20th century average of 15.8°C (60.5°F).
# In the Southern Hemisphere, both the February 2010 average temperature for land areas and the Hemisphere as a whole (land and ocean surface combined), represented the warmest February on record. The Southern Hemisphere ocean temperature tied with 1998 as the warmest February on record. ...
Thank God that statistics are the Devil's plaything.
Tue, Mar 9, 2010 from McClatchy, via Miami Herald: Growing low-oxygen zones in oceans worry scientists In some spots off Washington state and Oregon, the almost complete absence of oxygen has left piles of Dungeness crab carcasses littering the ocean floor, killed off 25-year-old sea stars, crippled colonies of sea anemones and produced mats of potentially noxious bacteria that thrive in such conditions.... "The depletion of oxygen levels in all three oceans is striking," said Gregory Johnson, an oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Seattle.
In some spots, such as off the Southern California coast, oxygen levels have dropped roughly 20 percent over the past 25 years. Elsewhere, scientists say, oxygen levels might have declined by one-third over 50 years."The real surprise is how this has become the new norm," said Jack Barth, an oceanography professor at Oregon State University. "We are seeing it year after year." ...
Thu, Mar 4, 2010 from National Geographic: Arctic Sea Belching Tons of Methane Arctic seabeds are belching massive quantities of methane, according to a new study that says ocean permafrost is a huge and largely overlooked source of the powerful greenhouse gas, which has been linked to global warming.
Previous research had found methane bubbling out of melting permafrost -- frozen soil -- in Arctic wetlands and lakes.
But the permafrost lining the deep, cold seas was thought to be staying frozen solid, holding in untold amounts of trapped methane.
"It's not the case anymore," said study leader Natalia Shakhova, a biogeochemist at the University of Fairbanks, Alaska. "The permafrost is actually failing in its ability to preserve this leakage."... The scientists found that much of the seawater above the shelf is laden with methane, which in turn is being released into the atmosphere.
What's more, the team found that current atmospheric methane levels in the Arctic are three times higher than those recorded across previous climate cycles going back 400,000 years. This phenomenon most likely isn't limited to the East Siberian Sea, the researchers note. If permafrost is melting in this part of the Arctic, all shallow areas along the Arctic shelf should be similarly affected. ...
Sat, Feb 27, 2010 from Science, via DesdemonaDespair: Pacific Northwest 'dead zone' hypoxic events unprecedented A review of all available ocean data records concludes that the low-oxygen events which have plagued the Pacific Northwest coast since 2002 are unprecedented in the five decades prior to that, and may well be linked to the stronger, persistent winds that are expected to occur with global warming.
In a new study to be published Friday in the journal Science, researchers from Oregon State University outline a "potential for rapid reorganization" in basic marine ecosystems and the climatic forces that drive them, and suggest that these low-oxygen, or "hypoxic" events are now more likely to be the rule rather than the exception.
"In this part of the marine environment, we may have crossed a tipping point," said Jane Lubchenco... The rapid and disturbing shift of ocean conditions in what has traditionally been one of the world's more productive marine areas -- what's called the California Current Large Marine Ecosystem -- has garnered much attention in recent years, also raising questions about whether it has happened before, and what is causing it.... "At this point, I’d be surprised if this trend towards hypoxic events didn’t continue," Barth said... ...
Maybe the fish are just hyperventilating and using up the oxygen.
Thu, Feb 25, 2010 from Oceanography: A Very Inconvenient Truth (PDF) Once atmospheric temperature reaches
equilibrium at a certain peak-overall GHG concentration, it will not drop
markedly for the next thousand years
even as GHG concentrations decline.
This irreversibility comes about because
the atmosphere's loss of heat to the ocean
is even more gradual than its loss of CO2. The thermal inertia of the ocean, which
is delaying the rate of climate warming today, will delay the rate of climate
cooling in the future. A crucial point for
policymakers and the public to recognize
is that the global GHG stabilization level
reached during the twenty-first century
will have climatic consequences for the
remainder of the millennium. ...
I think that means we still have a decade or two to party!
Thu, Feb 25, 2010 from Scientific American: Waiting to Inhale: Deep-Ocean Low-Oxygen Zones Spreading to Shallower Coastal Waters A plague of oxygen-deprived waters from the deep ocean is creeping up over the continental shelves off the Pacific Northwest and forcing marine species there to relocate or die. Since 2002 tongues of hypoxic, or low-oxygen, waters from deeper areas offshore have slipped into shallower near-shore environments off the Oregon coast, although not close enough to be oxygenated by the waves. The problem stems from oxygen reduction in deep water, a phenomenon that some scientists are observing in oceans worldwide, and that may be related to climate change. The hypoxic seawater is distinct from the well-known "dead zones" that form at the mouths of the Mississippi and other rivers around the world. Those areas result from agricultural runoff, which lead to algae blooms that consume oxygen. Rather, the Pacific Northwest problem is broader and more mysterious.
...
Mon, Feb 22, 2010 from USGS, via EurekAlert: Ice shelves disappearing on Antarctic Peninsula Ice shelves are retreating in the southern section of the Antarctic Peninsula due to climate change. This could result in glacier retreat and sea-level rise if warming continues, threatening coastal communities and low-lying islands worldwide.
Research by the U.S. Geological Survey is the first to document that every ice front in the southern part of the Antarctic Peninsula has been retreating overall from 1947 to 2009, with the most dramatic changes occurring since 1990. The USGS previously documented that the majority of ice fronts on the entire Peninsula have also retreated during the late 20th century and into the early 21st century.... The Peninsula is one of Antarctica's most rapidly changing areas because it is farthest away from the South Pole, and its ice shelf loss may be a forecast of changes in other parts of Antarctica and the world if warming continues. ...
I know -- let's geobuild bookends for those shelves!
Mon, Feb 22, 2010 from Penn State via ScienceDaily: Diversity of Corals, Algae in Warm Indian Ocean Suggests Resilience to Future Global Warming Penn State researchers and their international collaborators have discovered a diversity of corals harboring unusual species of symbiotic algae in the warm waters of the Andaman Sea in the northeastern Indian Ocean. "The existence of so many novel coral symbioses thriving in a place that is too warm for most corals gives us hope that coral reefs and the ecosystems they support may persist -- at least in some places -- in the face of global warming," said the team's leader, Penn State Assistant Professor of Biology Todd LaJeunesse. According to LaJeunesse, the comprehensiveness of the team's survey, which also included analysis of the corals and symbiotic algae living in the cooler western Indian Ocean and Great Barrier Reef area of Australia, is unparalleled by any other study. ...
Mon, Feb 15, 2010 from New Scientist: Greenland's glaciers disappearing from the bottom up Water warmed by climate change is taking giant bites out of the underbellies of Greenland's glaciers. As much as 75 per cent of the ice lost by the glaciers is melted by ocean warmth.
"There's an entrenched view in the public community that glaciers only lose ice when icebergs calve off," says Eric Rignot at the University of California, Irvine. "Our study shows that what's happening beneath the water is just as important."... The underwater faces of the different glaciers retreated by between 0.7 and 3.9 metres each day, representing 20 times more ice than melts off the top of the glacier. This creates ice overhangs that crumble into the sea, says Paul Holland at the British Antarctic Society. ...
I didn't realize that glaciers could reveal a dark underbelly.
Fri, Jan 22, 2010 from NASA: NASA: Last decade was warmest on record, 2009 one of warmest years A new analysis of global surface temperatures by NASA scientists finds the past year was tied for the second warmest since 1880. In the Southern Hemisphere, 2009 was the warmest year on record.
Although 2008 was the coolest year of the decade because of a strong La Nina that cooled the tropical Pacific Ocean, 2009 saw a return to a near-record global temperatures as the La Nina diminished, according to the new analysis by NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York. The past year was a small fraction of a degree cooler than 2005, the warmest on record, putting 2009 in a virtual tie with a cluster of other years --1998, 2002, 2003, 2006, and 2007 -- for the second warmest on record.
"There's always interest in the annual temperature numbers and a given year's ranking, but the ranking often misses the point," said James Hansen, GISS director. "There's substantial year-to-year variability of global temperature caused by the tropical El Nino-La Nina cycle. When we average temperature over five or ten years to minimize that variability, we find global warming is continuing unabated."... In total, average global temperatures have increased by about 1.5 degrees F (0.8 degrees C) since 1880.
"That's the important number to keep in mind," said GISS climatologist Gavin Schmidt. "The difference between the second and sixth warmest years is trivial because the known uncertainty in the temperature measurement is larger than some of the differences between the warmest years." ...
Wed, Jan 13, 2010 from New Scientist: Major Antarctic glacier is 'past its tipping point' A major Antarctic glacier has passed its tipping point, according to a new modelling study. After losing increasing amounts of ice over the past decades, it is poised to collapse in a catastrophe that could raise global sea levels by 24 centimetres.
Pine Island glacier (PIG) is one of many at the fringes of the West Antarctic ice sheet. In 2004, satellite observations showed that it had started to thin, and that ice was flowing into the Amundsen Sea 25 per cent faster than it had 30 years before.
Now, the first study to model changes in the ice sheet in three dimensions shows that PIG has probably passed a critical "tipping point" and is irreversibly on track to lose 50 per cent of its ice in as little as 100 years, significantly raising global sea levels. ...
Wed, Jan 13, 2010 from NASA: Antarctica Losing 24 cubic miles per year, and growing Gravity data collected from space using NASA's Grace satellite show that Antarctica has been losing more than a hundred cubic kilometers (24 cubic miles) of ice each year since 2002. The latest data reveal that Antarctica is losing ice at an accelerating rate, too. How is it possible for surface melting to decrease, but for the continent to lose mass anyway? The answer boils down to the fact that ice can flow without melting.... Isabella Velicogna of JPL and the University of California, Irvine, uses Grace data to weigh the Antarctic ice sheet from space. Her work shows that the ice sheet is not only losing mass, but it is losing mass at an accelerating rate. "The important message is that it is not a linear trend. A linear trend means you have the same mass loss every year. The fact that it's above linear, this is the important idea, that ice loss is increasing with time," she says. And she points out that it isn't just the Grace data that show accelerating loss; the radar data do, too. "It isn't just one type of measurement. It's a series of independent measurements that are giving the same results, which makes it more robust." ...
Wed, Dec 16, 2009 from NASA, via WWF: NASA: November was the Warmest on Record NASA today (15 December 2009) updated its Global Land-Ocean Temperature Index with data for November 2009, indicating that the month was 0.68oC above the 1951-1980 mean, making it the warmest November on record.
NASA also issued data for the September-October-November period, indicating that it was the 2nd warmest on record for land and ocean combined, behind only Sep-Oct-Nov 2005. ...
Thu, Dec 10, 2009 from UPenn, via EurekAlert: Sea level is rising along US Atlantic coast, say Penn environmental scientists An international team of environmental scientists led by the University of Pennsylvania has shown that sea-level rise along the Atlantic Coast of the United States was 2 millimeters faster in the 20th century than at any time in the past 4,000 years.... Researchers corrected relative sea-level data from tide gauges using the coastal-subsidence values. Results clearly show that the 20th-century rate of sea-level rise is 2 millimeters higher than the background rate of the past 4,000 years. Furthermore, the magnitude of the sea-level rise increases in a southerly direction from Maine to South Carolina. This is the first demonstrated evidence of this phenomenon from observational data alone. Researchers believe this may be related to the melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet and ocean thermal expansion. ...
This is just "anecdotal" data... y'know, just stories that the earth is telling.
Sun, Nov 29, 2009 from Globe and Mail (Canada): 'Permanent' Arctic sea ice has nearly vanished, expert fears One of Canada's top northern researchers says the permanent Arctic sea ice that is home to the world's polar bears and usually survives the summer has all but disappeared. Experts around the world believed the ice was recovering because satellite images showed it expanding.... "It caught us all by surprise because we were expecting there to be multiyear sea ice -- the whole world thought it was multiyear sea ice," said Dr. Barber, who just returned from an expedition to the Beaufort Sea.
"Unfortunately what we found was that the multiyear [ice] has all but disappeared. What's left is this remnant, rotten ice." ...
Thu, Nov 19, 2009 from New York Times: Seas Grow Less Effective at Absorbing Emissions The Earth's oceans, which have absorbed carbon dioxide from fuel emissions since the dawn of the industrial era, have recently grown less efficient at sopping it up, new research suggests.
Emissions from the burning of fossil fuels began soaring in the 1950s, and oceans largely kept up, scientists say. But the growth in the intake rate has slowed since the 1980s, and markedly so since 2000, the authors of a study write in a report in Thursday's issue of Nature.
The research suggests that the seas cannot indefinitely be considered a reliable "carbon sink" as humans generate heat-trapping gases linked to global warming.
The slowdown in the rise of the absorption rate resulted from a gradual change in the oceans' chemistry, the study found. "The more carbon dioxide the ocean absorbs, the more acidic it becomes and the less carbon dioxide it can absorb," said the study's lead author, Samar Khatiwala... ...
Mon, Nov 16, 2009 from Associated Press: Jellyfish swarm northward in warming world ...This year's jellyfish swarm is one of the worst... Once considered a rarity occurring every 40 years, they are now an almost annual occurrence along several thousand kilometers (miles) of Japanese coast, and far beyond Japan.
Scientists believe climate change, the warming of oceans, has allowed some of the almost 2,000 jellyfish species to expand their ranges, appear earlier in the year and increase overall numbers, much as warming has helped ticks, bark beetles and other pests to spread to new latitudes.
The gelatinous seaborne creatures are blamed for decimating fishing industries in the Bering and Black seas, forcing the shutdown of seaside power and desalination plants in Japan, the Middle East and Africa, and terrorizing beachgoers worldwide, the U.S. National Science Foundation says. ...
Mon, Nov 9, 2009 from McClatchy Newspapers: As oceans fall ill, Washington bureaucrats squabble ...Every summer a dead zone of oxygen-depleted water the size of Massachusetts forms in the Gulf of Mexico; others have been found off Oregon and in the Chesapeake Bay, Lake Erie and the Baltic and Black seas. Some studies indicate that North Pole seawater could turn caustic in 10 years, and that the Southern Ocean already may be saturated with carbon dioxide....As the grim news mounts, a storm is brewing in Washington, D.C., over who should oversee oceans policies...However, NOAA, the nation's primary ocean agency, which includes the National Ocean Service, the nation's premier science agency for oceans and coasts... is missing from the task force's list...."NOAA is the nation's primary ocean agency," NOAA administrator Lubchenco told the subcommittee. "Our name says it all." ...
Tue, Nov 3, 2009 from National Geographic News: Nat'l Geo: Six Degrees Would Change the World "Like something out of a disaster movie, a six degree global average temperature rise in the next one hundred years could render the world something completely different." Their interactive map lets the reader explore one, two, three, up to six degrees, with map hotspots. At six degrees, among others, "emergency alert system disbanded," because -- it's all one giant emergency.
...
Yet another "disaster movie" simile? This is becoming a trope!
Mon, Oct 26, 2009 from BBC: 'Freezer plan' bid to save coral A meeting in Denmark took evidence from researchers that most coral reefs will not survive even if tough regulations on greenhouse gases are put in place.
Scientists proposed storing samples of coral species in liquid nitrogen.
That will allow them to be reintroduced to the seas in the future if global temperatures can be stabilised.... At this meeting, politicians and scientists acknowledged that global emissions of carbon dioxide are rising so fast that we are losing the fight to save coral and the world must develop an alternative plan. ...
Tue, Oct 13, 2009 from The Australian: Scientists back law to limit farm runoff to Great Barrier Reef SCIENTISTS have backed the Queensland government's crackdown on farm runoffs to the Great Barrier Reef, describing new laws to limit the chemicals on sugar crops and pastures as "the right answer".
Conservation groups have swung behind the measures, after producer organisations and individual farmers branded them unnecessary and a sop to the green lobby.... "The state is taking its responsibility to the reef very seriously ... I think we have to do everything we can."
Marine scientists have warned that vast sections of the reef are threatened by the coral bleaching associated with rising sea temperatures caused by climate change.... Ms Jones's spokesman pointed out that high concentrations of the nutrients associated with fertiliser runoff were being detected up to 50km offshore. ...
Scientists and specialists weighing in on policy? What? Isn't more study needed?
Fri, Oct 9, 2009 from National Geographic News: Giant, Mucus-Like Sea Blobs on the Rise, Pose Danger As sea temperatures have risen in recent decades, enormous sheets of a mucus-like material have begun forming more often, oozing into new regions, and lasting longer, a new Mediterranean Sea study says... Up to 124 miles (200 kilometers) long, the mucilages appear naturally, usually near Mediterranean coasts in summer. The season's warm weather makes seawater more stable, which facilitates the bonding of the organic matter that makes up the blobs.... Now, due to warmer temperatures, the mucilages are forming in winter too -- and lasting for months.... But the new study found that Mediterranean mucilages harbor bacteria and viruses, including potentially deadly E. coli, Danovaro said. ...
Might the mucilage blobs compete with the jellyfish swarms?
Wed, Sep 30, 2009 from Royal Gazette (Bermuda): Expert warns against eating sickly fish Dr. Vogelbein said: "It's always the big question, 'are the fish safe to eat?' I think common sense should be used. People who fish know what a healthy fish looks like.
"Those are safe to eat. But a fish which has ulcers on it [such as a lack of scales and blood on the skin] should not be." ... But he said the die-off was concerning as it shed light on a variety of environmental factors, as well an infection, that appeared to be causing the die-off. ... He said there seemed to be environmental factors leading to the death of the fish but added: "Some of the fish are showing skin ulcers and some of the fish are also showing signs of infections in their gills.
"There appears to be an organism playing a role. We have been able to isolate some bacterial organism."
Dr. Vogelbein also said that a weakened immune system due to high water temperatures could be causing fish to react negatively to bacteria regularly found in the ocean. ...
Wed, Sep 23, 2009 from Greenwire: Biodiversity a Bitter Pill in 'Tropical' Mediterranean Sea Two weeks ago, a group of marine biologists from Israel's National Institute of Oceanography set sail from the country's central coast... They had a rich catch that night... pucker-faced dragonet fish, sprawling octopuses and brown crabs, snapping their claws. On the examination table, it seemed a display of the sea's bounty.
Unfortunately, it was another sea's bounty.
Almost all of the species Galil found that night were natives of the Indian or Pacific oceans. Lured by warming waters and a newly improved route through the Suez Canal, tropical marine species have enacted a slow march into the Mediterranean, displacing native species and disrupting ecosystems. ...
Thu, Sep 17, 2009 from Environmental Science and Technology: Greenhouse gas leaking from Arctic Ocean floor Scientists have reported the presence of previously unknown sources of methane—a greenhouse gas some 25 times more powerful than CO2 at trapping heat—bubbling up from the Arctic Ocean seafloor north of Norway. Gradual warming of a regional current has caused temperature-sensitive methane hydrate below the seabed to break down and discharge the gas, the researchers say... Over the past couple of decades, as the tools for oceanographic exploration have grown more sophisticated, researchers have documented about Previously, International Polar Year (2007) surveys of the East Siberian Arctic shelf uncovered abundant methane seeps and measured record-breaking summertime concentrations of the gas in northern polar waters. ...
Wed, Sep 16, 2009 from AP, via PhysOrg.com: World's oceans warmest on record this summer Ocean temperatures averaged 62.5 degrees Fahrenheit in the June-August period, 1.04 degree higher than normal for the period.
And for August the world sea-surface average was 62.4 degrees, 1.03 higher than usual, also the warmest for August on record, NOAA's National Climatic Data Center said.
The report is based on data back to 1880.
The combined land and water temperature worldwide was 61.2 degrees, third warmest on record for the three-month period. For August it was 58.2 degrees, fourth warmest. Climate change has been raising the planet's average temperature steadily in recent decades. All of the 10 hottest years on record have occurred since 1997. ...
We're so lucky that global warming is just a theory.
Wed, Sep 16, 2009 from National Geographic News: Sea Levels Rose Two Feet This Summer in U.S. East The immediate cause of the unexpected rise has now been solved, U.S. officials say in a new report (hint: it wasn't global warming). But the underlying reason remains a mystery.... NOAA's phones began ringing this summer when East Coast residents reported higher than predicted water levels, much like those associated with short-term weather events like tropical storms. But these high seas persisted for weeks, throughout June and July.
The startling rise caused only minor coastal flooding -- but major head scratching among scientists.... But this summer, for reasons unknown, "the Gulf Stream slowed down," Edwing said, sending water toward the coasts -- and sea levels shooting upward.
Adding to the sustained surge, autumn winds from the northeastern Atlantic arrived a few months early, pushing even more water coastward. ...
It's not global warming, hooray! Instead, it's the Gulf stream slowing mysteriously!
Wed, Sep 9, 2009 from Telegraph.co.uk: North Sea cod 'doomed by climate change' Species of plankton, on which cod larvae feed, have moved away in search of cooler waters. The decline in cod stocks has led to an explosion in the populations of crabs and jellyfish, on which the adult fish feed.
The shortage of predators at the top of the food chain has had a knock-on effect on flat fish, such as plaice and sole, whose offspring are eaten by crabs.... The researchers studied the distribution of surface-dwelling copepod plankton on which young cod feed. Copepod's numbers have declined by more than 60 per cent as the sea has warmed over the last four decades.
Dr Kirkby said: "The plankton that young cod usually eat during March, April and May, a species of copepod that is the size of a grain of rice, prefer cold water and so they have become much less frequent as the North Sea has warmed.... "As top predators such as cod are declining, this appears to have had a cascading effect on the whole ecosystem." ...
Fri, Sep 4, 2009 from Guardian (UK): How global warming sealed the fate of the world's coral reefs If you thought you had heard enough bad news on the environment and that the situation could not get any worse, then steel yourself. Coral reefs are doomed. The situation is virtually hopeless. Forget ice caps and rising sea levels: the tropical coral reef looks like it will enter the history books as the first major ecosystem wiped out by our love of cheap energy.... "The future is horrific," says Charlie Veron, an Australian marine biologist who is widely regarded as the world's foremost expert on coral reefs. "There is no hope of reefs surviving to even mid-century in any form that we now recognise. If, and when, they go, they will take with them about one-third of the world's marine biodiversity. Then there is a domino effect, as reefs fail so will other ecosystems. This is the path of a mass extinction event, when most life, especially tropical marine life, goes extinct." ...
I wish these scientists would speak in less "technical" language. Oh, and more good news, willya?
Fri, Aug 21, 2009 from Associated Press: In hot water: World sets ocean temperature record ...It's not just the ocean off the Northeast coast that is super-warm this summer. July was the hottest the world's oceans have been in almost 130 years of record-keeping. The average water temperature worldwide was 62.6 degrees, according to the National Climatic Data Center, the branch of the U.S. government that keeps world weather records. That was 1.1 degree higher than the 20th century average, and beat the previous high set in 1998 by a couple hundredths of a degree. The coolest recorded ocean temperature was 59.3 degrees in December 1909.
Meteorologists said there's a combination of forces at work this year: A natural El Nino system just getting started on top of worsening man-made global warming, and a dash of random weather variations. The resulting ocean heat is already harming threatened coral reefs. It could also hasten the melting of Arctic sea ice and help hurricanes strengthen. ...
Mon, Aug 17, 2009 from New Scientist: As Arctic Ocean warms, megatonnes of methane bubble up It's been predicted for years, and now it's happening. Deep in the Arctic Ocean, water warmed by climate change is forcing the release of methane from beneath the sea floor.
Over 250 plumes of gas have been discovered bubbling up from the sea floor to the west of the Svalbard archipelago, which lies north of Norway. The bubbles are mostly methane, which is a greenhouse gas much more powerful than carbon dioxide.... "Hydrates are stable only within a particular range of temperatures," says Minshull. "So if the ocean warms, some of the hydrates will break down and release their methane."... Just because it fails to reach the surface doesn't mean the methane is harmless, though, as some of it gets converted to carbon dioxide. The CO2 then dissolves in seawater and makes the oceans more acidic. ...
The worst-case scenario regarding really rapid greenhouse effects...? We may have to revise it.
Sat, Aug 15, 2009 from Canwest News: Experts: Arctic ice experiencing severe summer retreat As Prime Minister Stephen Harper heads north next week for what's become his annual summer visit to the Arctic, he will encounter a world scientists believe is in the midst of an unprecedented and irreversible transformation, where retreating sea ice and related environmental changes are radically reshaping the region's future....
In the upcoming days, researchers from around the world will reassess the state of the Arctic Ocean ice cover and gauge whether this summer's retreat -- already viewed as another "extreme" thaw -- will surpass the 2007 meltdown that shocked even veteran observers of the polar realm.... [T]he biggest floes now jamming the fabled Arctic shipping corridor are southward-floating, orphaned chunks of the thickest, oldest "multi-year" ice mass that has been steadily disintegrating -- in North America, Europe and Asia -- along the edges of the central Arctic Ocean.... The region is, Howell told Canwest News Service, "past the 'tipping-point,'" when increasing expanses of darker, open water absorb ever more heat and the diminished ice cover -- normally able to reflect sunlight because of its lighter surface -- melts more quickly. ...
It's freakin' chemistry and physics, you idiot deniers!
Fri, Aug 14, 2009 from National Oceanographic Centre, via EurekAlert: Nitrogen fixation and phytoplankton blooms in the southwest Indian Ocean Nitrogen-fixing bacteria convert atmospheric nitrogen into nitrogen compounds that organisms can then use as food. This process is thought to be important in areas of the ocean where nitrogen-based nutrients are otherwise in short supply, and the researchers confirm that this is indeed the case in the region south of Madagascar.
But there were some surprises. Previously, it has been thought that the large-scale autumn bloom that develops in this region is driven by nitrogen-fixing blue-green algae, or cyanobacteria, called Trichodesmium, colonies of which the researchers found to be abundant. However, the 2005 bloom was dominated by a diatom -- a type of phytoplankton -- the cells of which play host to another nitrogen-fixing cyanobacterium called Richella intracellularis, with [the blue-green algae] Trichodesmium apparently playing second fiddle.... Diatoms have relatively large cells, and when they die they sink down the water column, carrying with them carbon that is ultimately derived from carbon dioxide drawn from the atmosphere though the process of photosynthesis. ...
Wed, Aug 12, 2009 from Penn State, via EurekAlert: Harbingers of increased Atlantic hurricane activity identified Mann, working with [others,] reconstructed the past 1,500 years of hurricanes using two independent methods. They report their results in today's (Aug. 13) issue of Nature.
One estimate of hurricane numbers is based on sediment deposited during landfall hurricanes.... The other method used a previously developed statistical model for predicting hurricane activity based on climate variables.... Both hurricane reconstructions indicate similar overall patterns and both indicate a high period of hurricane activity during the Medieval Climate Anomaly around AD 900 to 1100.
"We are at levels now that are about as high as anything we have seen in the past 1,000 years," said Mann.... "It seems that the paleodata support the contention that greenhouse warming may increase the frequency of Atlantic tropical storms," said Mann. "It may not be just that the storms are stronger, but that there are there may be more of them as well." ...
Tue, Aug 11, 2009 from ARC Center, via ScienceDaily: Humans 'Damaging The Oceans' In Profound Ways Man-made carbon emissions "are affecting marine biological processes from genes to ecosystems over scales from rock pools to ocean basins, impacting ecosystem services and threatening human food security," ... rates of physical change in the oceans are unprecedented in some cases, and change in ocean life is likely to be equally quick.
These include changes in the areas fish and other sea species can inhabit, invasions, extinctions and major shifts in marine ecosystems.... Man-made carbon emissions are now above the 'worst case' scenario envisioned by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), causing the most rapid global warming seen since the peak of the last Ice Age. At the same time the carbon is acidifying the oceans, with harmful consequences for certain plankton and shellfish. ...
Whoops. Our bad. How do you hit Restart on this game?
Fri, Jul 24, 2009 from VOA News: Report: 85 Percent of World's Oyster Reefs Have Been Lost A recent study by environmental organizations found that nearly 85 percent of the oyster reefs worldwide have been lost. But beyond providing food around the world, oyster reefs play a key role in the oceans....
"The issue is that oysters face a multitude of stresses in coastal environments; from water quality to algae blooms, to high sediment loads and some of the places are too far gone," he said.
Oysters are ecosystem engineers that filter water and remove pollution and excess nutrients that can spark algae blooms. But, Luckenback says, their capacity has a limit and research shows that oysters expose to a variety of toxins have been shown to be more susceptible to diseases and death. ...
Fri, Jul 24, 2009 from BBC: Clouds in climate 'vicious cycle' Clouds over the North-East Pacific dissipate as the ocean warms, according to a study in the journal Science.
Researchers have described this as a "vicious cycle" of warming, as reduced cloud cover allows more of the Sun's rays to heat the Earth.
They say warming could gradually reduce the low-level cloud cover that is thought to help cool the globe.
But the team stressed that it was not yet possible to quantify how much this might impact on global temperatures.
They said that accurate simulations of these cloud effects would improve the models scientists use to predict future climate change patterns.
The accuracy of these models has been hampered by the uncertain influence of clouds on the global climate system.
The low-level clouds studied here are of particular interest, as they have been shown to have a net cooling effect on the Earth, by reflecting the Sun's rays. ...
Tue, Jul 21, 2009 from Mongabay: Global ocean temperatures at warmest level since 1880 Global ocean temperatures rose to the warmest on record, according to data released last week by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The combined average global land and ocean surface temperature for June was second-warmest since global recording-keeping began in 1880.... Worldwide sea surface temperatures were 62.56 F (16.99 C), or 1.06 degrees F (0.59 C) above the 20th century average of 61.5 F (16.4 C).... The combined global land and ocean surface temperature for June 2009 was the second warmest on record after 2005...
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Just mere coincidence that this is happening now. Move along. Nothing to see here.
Mon, Jun 29, 2009 from Paul Krugman, New York Times: Betraying the Planet: Denial is Treason A handful of these no votes came from representatives who considered the bill too weak, but most rejected the bill because they rejected the whole notion that we have to do something about greenhouse gases.
And as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn't help thinking that I was watching a form of treason -- treason against the planet.
To fully appreciate the irresponsibility and immorality of climate-change denial, you need to know about the grim turn taken by the latest climate research.
The fact is that the planet is changing faster than even pessimists expected: ice caps are shrinking, arid zones spreading, at a terrifying rate. And according to a number of recent studies, catastrophe -- a rise in temperature so large as to be almost unthinkable -- can no longer be considered a mere possibility. It is, instead, the most likely outcome if we continue along our present course. ...
Sat, Jun 20, 2009 from Desdemona Despair: Rising ocean temperatures near worst-case predictions The ocean is warming about 50 per cent faster than reported two years ago, according to an update of the latest climate science.
A report compiling research presented at a science congress in Copenhagen in March says recent observations are near the worst-case predictions of the 2007 report by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
In the case of sea-level rise, it is happening at an even greater rate than projected -- largely due to rising ocean temperatures causing thermal expansion of seawater.... The report, titled Climate change: Global risks, challenges & decisions, says greenhouse gas emissions needed to peak within the next six years for the world to [have] a chance of limiting global warming above pre-industrial levels to about two degrees. ...
Six years? That's more than half a decade away. What's the worry?
Wed, Jun 10, 2009 from McClatchy Newspapers: Scientists: Global warming has already changed oceans In Washington state, oysters in some areas haven't reproduced for four years, and preliminary evidence suggests that the increasing acidity of the ocean could be the cause. In the Gulf of Mexico, falling oxygen levels in the water have forced shrimp to migrate elsewhere.... Federal studies also found acidity levels in the North Pacific and off Alaska are unusually high compared to other ocean regions. The high acidity is already taking a toll of such tiny species as pteropods, which are an important food for salmon and other fish.
As greenhouse gas emissions increase, billions of tons of carbon dioxide from smokestacks and vehicle tailpipes are absorbed by the oceans. The result is carbonic acid, which dilutes the "rich soup" of calcium carbonate in the seawater that many species, especially on the low end of the food chain, thrive in... ...
Tue, Jun 9, 2009 from The Vancouver Sun: Global warming may be good for starfish: UBC study Global warming may benefit certain marine life, a study by University of B.C. researchers suggests.
Rebecca Gooding, a UBC PhD student, found that young purple ochre sea stars grow faster, heavier and larger as water warms and concentrations of carbon dioxide, a byproduct of global warming, increase.
“Global warming … could be good for it,” said Gooding.
“In an evolutionary sense, if they’re bigger, that’s probably better, because if they reach adulthood faster, they can spend more time producing offspring,” she said. ...
Sweet... the giant starfish and the giant jellyfish can live happily ever after...
Tue, May 19, 2009 from MIT, via EurekAlert: MIT: Climate change odds much worse than thought The most comprehensive modeling yet carried out on the likelihood of how much hotter the Earth's climate will get in this century shows that without rapid and massive action, the problem will be about twice as severe as previously estimated six years ago -- and could be even worse than that.... While the outcomes in the "no policy" projections now look much worse than before, there is less change from previous work in the projected outcomes if strong policies are put in place now to drastically curb greenhouse gas emissions. Without action, "there is significantly more risk than we previously estimated," Prinn says. "This increases the urgency for significant policy action."
To illustrate the range of probabilities revealed by the 400 simulations, Prinn and the team produced a "roulette wheel" that reflects the latest relative odds of various levels of temperature rise. The wheel provides a very graphic representation of just how serious the potential climate impacts are.
"There's no way the world can or should take these risks," Prinn says. And the odds indicated by this modeling may actually understate the problem, because the model does not fully incorporate other positive feedbacks that can occur, for example, if increased temperatures caused a large-scale melting of permafrost in arctic regions and subsequent release of large quantities of methane, a very potent greenhouse gas. Including that feedback "is just going to make it worse," Prinn says. ...
How can "positive feedbacks" be so danged negative?
Sat, Mar 28, 2009 from Miami Herald: Ample evidence Florida's feeling effects of climate change ...People who study South Florida's environment say global warming is starting to have a significant impact on Florida's fish, fowl and flora... Changes in Florida's climate are far more subtle than, say, a melting Alaskan glacier. But the state has a lot at stake: Florida has 1,200 miles of coastline and 11 million acres of wetlands and low elevations, making it more vulnerable to rising seas, beach erosion and the inland movement of saltwater in places like the Keys.
The last report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said that tropical cyclones (which we call hurricanes) are increasing in intensity in some ocean basins, especially in the North Atlantic basin where hurricanes form, because of warming seas. ...
Fri, Mar 20, 2009 from Yale Environment 360: With Temperatures Rising, Here Comes 'Global Weirding' The concept of "global weirding" is emerging as a notable complement to its cause, global warming. Coined by Hunter Lovins, a founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute, it describes the consequences of the rise in average global temperatures, which are expected to amplify the abnormal: hotter heat spells, longer and sharper droughts, more violent storms, and more intense flooding.
Given anticipated warming trajectories, many of these physical changes are statistically predictable and can be fairly accurately modeled. But as an ecologist, I fear it is the alterations to the living realm where "weirdness" will be a most apropos, if not downright tepid, label. This is certainly the case in my area of study -- the aquatic realm -- where global weirding is already well underway. ...
If we can just find the right catchphrase... we just might beat climate change yet!
Wed, Mar 18, 2009 from NSF, via EurekAlert: Andrill demonstrates climate warming affects Antarctic ice sheet stability "The sedimentary record indicates that under global warming conditions that were similar to those projected to occur over the next century, protective ice shelves could shrink or even disappear and the [West Antarctic Ice Sheet] would become vulnerable to melting," Powell said. "If the current warm period persists, the ice sheet could diminish substantially or even disappear over time. This would result in a potentially significant rise in sea levels." ... "It also appears that when atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations reached 400 parts per million around four million years ago, the associated global warming amplified the effect of the Earth's axial tilt on the stability of the ice sheet," he said. ...
... gliding down the highway When the sheets are slip slidin' away.
Fri, Mar 13, 2009 from Telegraph.co.uk: World's leading scientists in desperate plea to politicians to act on climate change In what was described as a watershed moment, more than 2,500 leading environmental experts agreed a statement that called on governments to act before the planet becomes an unrecognisable -- and, in places, impossible -- place to live.
At an emergency climate summit in Copenhagen, scientists agreed that "worst case" scenarios were already becoming reality and that, unless drastic action was taken soon, "dangerous climate change" was imminent.... In a strongly worded message that, unusually for academics, appealed directly to politicians, they said there was "no excuse for inaction" and that "weak and "ineffective" governments must stand up to big business and "vested interests"....
Steps should be "vigorously and widely implemented", they said, to reduce greenhouse gases. Failure to do so would result in "significant risk" of "irreversible climatic shifts", the statement added...
Prof Kevin Anderson, the research director at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in Manchester, said: "Scientists have lost patience with carefully constructed messages being lost in the political noise. We are now prepared to stand up and say enough is enough." ...
Thu, Mar 12, 2009 from New Scientist: Global warming reaches the Antarctic abyss Even the deepest, darkest reaches of the Antarctic abyss are feeling the heat, according to new results presented at the climate change congress in Copenhagen, Denmark, on Tuesday.
Gregory Johnson, of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency, says even he was surprised by the findings. He says the changes could be responsible for up to 20 percent of the observed global sea-level rise.... On average, over the last decade, water at the surface of the oceans has gained 0.35 watts per square metre -- a measure of the amount of heat absorbed from the warming atmosphere. Johnson's measurements in the abyss are, in some regions, nearly three times that. ...
Mon, Mar 9, 2009 from Reuters: Rising ocean acidity cutting shell weights - study Acidifying oceans caused by rising carbon dioxide levels are cutting the shell weights of tiny marine animals in a process that could accelerate global warming, a scientist said on Monday.
William Howard of the University of Tasmania in Australia described the findings as an early-warning signal, adding the research was the first direct field evidence of marine life being affected by rising acidity of the oceans.
Oceans absorb large amounts of CO2 emitted by mankind through the burning of fossil fuels. The Southern Ocean between Australia and Antarctica is the largest of the ocean carbon sinks.
But scientists say the world's oceans are becoming more acidic as they absorb more planet-warming CO2, disrupting the process of calcification used by sea creatures to build shells as well as coral reefs. ...
Maybe they can just buy their shells at Shells "R" Us!
Thu, Feb 26, 2009 from The Daily Climate: Saving the oceans: 'Mission Possible' ...[oceanographer and coral reef geologist Jeonie] Kleypas is one of the world's experts on the effects of climate change on the world's coral reefs, testifying to Congress and presenting papers around the world. She believes that societies must immediately and drastically reduce worldwide carbon emissions, but is also training her research to see if there are ways "to bolster coral reef health so they can weather the climate crisis."....Like many scientists, she struggles to find ways to impart the importance of biodiversity to humans in ways both poetic and prosaic. Losing a third of the coral species on a reef, she says, "is like losing a third of the colors from a Van Gogh painting." Reaching for a different demographic, she adds, "The loss of biodiversity is like having a football team with only tight ends."
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Or maybe it's like losing all the vowels from the word " p c l ps ."
Tue, Feb 24, 2009 from Science Alert (Australia): Warm oceans slow coral growth It's official: the biggest and most robust corals on the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) have slowed their growth by more than 14 per cent since the "tipping point" year of 1990. Evidence is strong that the decline has been caused by a synergistic combination of rising sea surface temperatures and ocean acidification.... "It is cause for extreme concern that such changes are already evident, with the relatively modest climate changes observed to date, in the world's best protected and managed coral reef ecosystem," according to AIMS scientist and co-author Dr Janice Lough.... "The data suggest that this severe and sudden decline in calcification is unprecedented in at least 400 years," said AIMS scientist and principal author Dr Glenn De'ath. ...
I don't wanna hear no scientists saying "severe and sudden" or "extreme concern" about anything.
Fri, Feb 20, 2009 from SciDev.net: World's fisheries face climate change threat Researchers examined the fisheries of 132 nations to determine which were the most vulnerable, based on the potential environmental impact of climate change, how dependent their economy and diet were on fisheries, and the capacity of the country to adapt.
Climate change can affect the temperature of inland lakes, the health of reefs and how nutrients circulate in the oceans, the researchers say.
They identified 33 countries as "highly vulnerable" to the effects of global warming on fisheries.
These countries produce 20 per cent of the world's fish exports and 22 are already classified by the UN as "least developed". Inhabitants of vulnerable countries are also more dependent on fish for protein -- 27 per cent of dietary protein is gained from fish, compared with 13 per cent in other countries. Two-thirds of the most vulnerable nations identified are in tropical Africa.
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Surely Nature operates on the same supply/demand laws that the economy does: it'll just produce more fisheries. Because poor people demand it.
Wed, Feb 18, 2009 from NOAA, via Mongabay: CO2 levels rise to a new record Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations climbed 2.28 parts-per-million (ppm) in 2008 to the highest level in at least 650,000 years -- and possibly 20 million years -- reports NOAA.
The average annual growth rate of CO2 concentrations this decade is now 2.1 ppm a year or 40 percent higher than that of the 1990s. CO2 emissions from the burning of fossil fuels are increasing at four times the rate of the previous decade.... Some scientists, including James Hansen of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, warn that CO2 levels must be kept below 350 ppm to avoid serious impacts from climate change. CO2 concentrations are presently around 386 ppm.
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Tue, Feb 17, 2009 from New Scientist: North Atlantic is world's 'climate superpower' IF EVER there was a superpower of the oceans, the North Atlantic, with its ability to control global weather systems, is it. The bad news is that this region also happens to be especially sensitive to the effects of climate change, so what is happening there could affect the world.
The planet's climate goes through periodic convulsions that affect every region simultaneously. The most recent were in the early 1940s and mid-1970s. The latter coincided with the start of more frequent El Nino events in the Pacific and a strong global warming trend.... But the findings will leave most climate scientists more worried. Today's climate is changing most dramatically in the far North Atlantic, with record warming and ice loss in recent years. If the climate's "tipping point" resides in these waters, then nature's synchronised chaos could unleash unexpectedly sudden and severe consequences. ...
Why does Science always give us bad news? Can't reality fit our desires?
Sun, Feb 15, 2009 from BBC (UK): Global warming 'underestimated' The severity of global warming over the next century will be much worse than previously believed, a leading climate scientist has warned.
Professor Chris Field, an author of a 2007 landmark report on climate change, said future temperatures "will be beyond anything" predicted.
Prof Field said the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report had underestimated the rate of change.
He said warming is likely to cause more environmental damage than forecast.... "We are basically looking now at a future climate that is beyond anything that we've considered seriously in climate policy," he said. ...
Tue, Jan 27, 2009 from NPR: Global Warming Is Irreversible, Study Says "People have imagined that if we stopped emitting carbon dioxide that the climate would go back to normal in 100 years or 200 years. What we're showing here is that's not right. It's essentially an irreversible change that will last for more than a thousand years," Solomon says.
This is because the oceans are currently soaking up a lot of the planet's excess heat -- and a lot of the carbon dioxide put into the air. The carbon dioxide and heat will eventually start coming out of the ocean. And that will take place for many hundreds of years.... The answer, he says, is sooner rather than later. Scientists have been trying to advise politicians about finding an acceptable level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The new study suggests that it's even more important to aim low. If we overshoot, the damage can't be easily undone. Oppenheimer feels more urgency than ever to deal with climate change, but he says that in the end, setting acceptable limits for carbon dioxide is a judgment call. ...
Mon, Oct 27, 2008 from London Guardian: Climate change 'making seas more salty' Global warming is making the sea more salty, according to new research that demonstrates the massive shifts in natural systems triggered by climate change.
Experts at the UK Met Office and Reading University say warmer temperatures over the Atlantic Ocean have significantly increased evaporation and reduced rainfall across a giant stretch of water from Africa to the Carribean in recent years. The change concentrates salt in the water left behind, and is predicted to make southern Europe and the Mediterranean much drier in future. ...
Fri, Oct 24, 2008 from Telegraph.co.uk: Salt levels in the ocean reflect human-induced climate change Global warming is changing levels of salt in the ocean leading to different weather patterns on land, meteorologists have found.... In the subtropical zone salt has increased to a level outside natural variability over the last 20 years, suggesting less rainfall and increased evaporation caused by human-induced climate change. However in the North Atlantic, where there are more changeable weather patterns, an increase in salt levels was put down to natural variation. ...
Mon, Oct 20, 2008 from Washington Post: Risk of Disease Rises With Water Temperatures When a 1991 cholera outbreak that killed thousands in Peru was traced to plankton blooms fueled by warmer-than-usual coastal waters, linking disease outbreaks to epidemics was a new idea. Now, scientists say, it is a near-certainty that global warming will drive significant increases in waterborne diseases around the world. ...
Sun, Oct 19, 2008 from Los Angeles Times: Migrating Alaskan pollock are creating the potential for a new dispute with Russia America's biggest catch lands here and at nearby ports every year: more than 2 billion pounds of Alaskan pollock to feed a global appetite for fish sticks, fast-food sandwiches and imitation crabmeat.... Yet the careful management that helped make Alaskan pollock a billion-dollar industry could unravel as the planet warms. Pollock and other fish in the Bering Sea are moving to higher latitudes as winter ice retreats and water temperatures rise. Alaskan pollock are becoming Russian pollock, swimming across an international boundary in search of food and setting off what could become a geopolitical dispute.
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Mon, Sep 1, 2008 from Edinburgh Scotsman: Temperature rises 'will be double the safe limit' for global warming "IT IS "improbable" global warming will be kept below 4C -- double the rise considered safe to avoid climate catastrophe -- according to an influential new report.
Internationally, it has long been agreed governments should be aiming to keep a global temperature rise below 2C, to avoid climate change spiralling out of control. However, a bleak new study by scientists at the Tyndall Centre, a leading organisation for climate change research at the University of Manchester, now suggests we should be adjusting our expectations towards far higher rises." ...
"Double the safe limit" will mean quadruple the trouble!
Wed, Aug 27, 2008 from PLoS ONE, via Power-Boat World: World's Marine Parks 'May Not Save Corals' They warn that many existing 'no take areas' (NTAs) in the Indian Ocean and around the world, while effective in protecting local fish, may not be much help in enabling reefs to recover from major coral bleaching events caused by ocean warming.
The research, published in the journal PLoS ONE, is the largest study of its kind ever carried out, covering 66 sites in seven countries in the Indian Ocean and spanning over a decade.
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Sat, Jul 26, 2008 from Time Magazine: Coral Reefs Face Extinction "You don't have to be a marine biologist to understand the importance of corals -- just ask any diver. The tiny underwater creatures are the architects of the beautiful, electric-colored coral reefs that lie in shallow tropical waters around the world. Divers swarm to them not merely for their intrinsic beauty, but because the reefs play host to a wealth of biodiversity unlike anywhere else in the underwater world. Coral reefs are home to more than 25 percent of total marine species. Take out the corals, and there are no reefs -- remove the reefs, and entire ecosystems collapse." ...
You don't have to be a marine biologist, but you can play one on tv!
Fri, Jul 18, 2008 from British Antarctic Survey via ScienceDaily: Fragile Antarctic Marine Life Pounded By Icebergs: Biodiversity Suffering "Antarctic worms, sea spiders, urchins and other marine creatures living in near-shore shallow habitats are regularly pounded by icebergs. New data suggests this environment along the Antarctic Peninsula is going to get hit more frequently. This is due to an increase in the number of icebergs scouring the seabed as a result of shrinking winter sea ice." ...
Great. Something new to worry about: thug icebergs
Wed, Jun 18, 2008 from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory: Ocean temperatures and sea level increases are 50 percent higher than previously estimated New research suggests that ocean temperature and associated sea level increases between 1961 and 2003 were 50 percent larger than estimated in the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report.... The research corrected for small but systematic biases recently discovered in the global ocean observing system, and uses statistical techniques that "infill" information in data-sparse regions. The results increase scientists' confidence in ocean observations and further demonstrate that climate models simulate ocean temperature variability more realistically than previously thought. ...
The results increase our confidence that we better get a move on!
Thu, Jun 5, 2008 from StraightGoods: Climate change casts marine science adrift Climate change is altering the world's oceans in so many ways scientists cannot keep pace, and as a result there is no comprehensive vision of its present and future impacts, say experts. Rising sea levels, changes in hurricane intensity and seasonality, declines in fisheries and corals are among the many effects attributed to climate change. In an attempt to put some order to their disconcerting findings, more than 450 scientists from some 60 countries gathered in the northern Spanish city of Gijón for the symposium "Effects of Climate Change on the World's Oceans...." ...
Fri, May 16, 2008 from Science, via EurekAlert: Atmosphere threatened by pollutants entering ocean, prof says Human-caused atmospheric nitrogen compounds are carried by wind and deposited into the ocean, where they act as a fertilizer and lead to increased production of marine plant life. The increase in plant life causes more carbon dioxide to be drawn from the atmosphere into the ocean. This process results in the removal of about 10 percent of the human-caused carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, thus potentially reducing the climate warming potential, according to the team's paper.... However, some of the nitrogen deposited in the ocean is re-processed to form another nitrogen compound called nitrous oxide, which is then released back into the atmosphere from the ocean. Nitrous oxide is a powerful greenhouse gas itself – about 300 times more powerful per molecule than carbon dioxide – thus cancelling out about two-thirds of the apparent gain from the carbon dioxide removal, Duce explained. "But of course, the whole system is so complex that we're still rather unsure about what some of the other impacts might be within the ocean," he said. ...
Sat, Mar 8, 2008 from NOAA National Marine Fisheries Service: Mysterious Eel Fishery Decline Blamed On Changing Ocean Conditions "American eels are fast disappearing from restaurant menus as stocks have declined sharply across the North Atlantic. While the reasons for the eel decline remain as mysterious as its long migrations, a recent study by a NOAA scientist and colleagues in Japan and the United Kingdom says shifts in ocean-atmosphere conditions may be a primary factor in declining reproduction and survival rates." ...
No more eels for meals? What other fish dish will fill my bummy tummy?
Fri, Feb 15, 2008 from Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Scientists fear Tipping Point for Pacific Ocean "Where scientists previously found a sea bottom abounding with life, two years ago they discovered the rotting carcasses of crabs, starfish and sea worms, swooshing from side to side in the current. Most fish had fled -- and those that didn't or couldn't joined the deathfest on the sea floor. Extraordinarily low oxygen levels were to blame -- swept up from the deep ocean into normally productive waters just off the Pacific Northwest coast by uncharacteristically strong winds....It looks like the Pacific has reached a "tipping point," a threshold where low-oxygen levels are becoming the rule, researchers said."
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The scientists conclude the ocean may be "poised for significant reorganization" -- sciencespeak for "we're screwed."
Mon, Jan 28, 2008 from Science: The Ocean's Deserts "The Sahara, the Gobi, the Chihuahuan--all are great deserts. But what about the South Pacific's subtropical gyre? This "biological desert" within a swirling expanse of nutrient-starved saltwater is the largest, and least productive, ecosystem of the South Pacific. Together with the subtropical gyres in other oceans, biological deserts cover 40 percent of Earth's surface. But their relative obscurity may be about to change. Researchers are reporting that the ocean's biological deserts have been expanding, and they are growing much faster than global warming models predict." ...
Hovering above these ocean deserts are mirages that look like sand.
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