oceans

Shark superhighways and radioactive fish bones

Scientists studying the sea floor near Antarctica discovered new species of fish, plankton and jellyfish. "We had some of the world's experts on Antarctic fish and they were completely, completely flabbergasted," said the leader of the expedition ...

... a researcher studying a dead zone off the northwest coast of the U.S. saw nothing on the ocean floor. "It appeared that everything that couldn't swim or scuttle away had died," she said. The dead zone is thought to be a result of climate change ...

... the government of Taiwan allocated $1 million in Taiwanese new dollars to clear the shore of dead fish, both wild and farmed, that had died during a recent cold snap ...

A lighthearted look at biosequestration

A semi-recent issue of High Country News carried a feature on the deep-rock carbon sequestration potential in the northwestern U.S.: it's maybe possible to inject CO2 captured from power plants into the basalt that underlies the region, producing inert calcium carbonate. If so, there's apparently enough basalt to capture centuries of the region's carbon emissions.

It's safe to say the research has its doubters. And carbon sequestration in general deserves the hairy eyeball: even if proven both ecologically and geologically viable and economically feasible, if it leads to the continued destruction of Appalachia and vast tracts of the West for coal, count me out.

Elsewhere, a study's findings added to the body of evidence that shellfish, like clams, oysters, and mussels (oh, and plankton, crustaceans, and corals), will start growing more slowly or dissolving altogether due to anthropogenic ocean acidification (from all of the excess CO2 we produce that goes into oceanic solution), which would dissolve their shells. Fewer/smaller/weaker shellfish would have economic effects, but also much greater impacts on marine life: they're an important food source for everything from fish to whales and birds.

My point? These critters fix carbon ("biosequestration") in their shells, so we could start losing an important piece of the ocean's ability to maintain its natural alkalinity, plus its tendency to sequester carbon, just when they're most needed.

My disinterested and clear-eyed proposal, then, is increased aquaculture of mollusks in bays, sounds, estuaries, sloughs, etc. We're already growing tens of millions of pounds of clams alone each year in the U.S., and unlike most other forms of aquaculture, you don't get the massive energetic losses like with the feeding of fish meal to top-of-the-food-chain finfish.

Depressing ocean news buoyed by Pam Anderson’s striptease

Walking into the office this morning, I saw this headline in bold letters on the front of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer: “Scientists fear ‘tipping point’ in Pacific Ocean.” Then, a news search told me this: “As vast as the oceans are, almost no waters remain untouched by human activities.” It’s enough to make me wanna strangle […]

Nearly all of world’s oceans tainted by human activity, says study

Human activity has tainted all but 3.7 percent of the world’s oceans, and 41 percent of the world’s waters have been heavily impacted, says a new study in Science. A graphic map illustrates in all-too-clear terms that the briny deep has taken a terrible toll from 17 human threats, including climate change, overfishing, fertilizer runoff, […]

Tiny island nation of Kiribati creates world’s largest marine reserve

The tiny Pacific island nation of Kiribati has created the world’s largest marine reserve, spanning 164,200 square miles (roughly the size of California). In contrast, the islands comprising Kiribati itself total only about 313 square miles, or about four times the size of Washington, D.C. The new Phoenix Islands Protected Area is home to sea […]

New studies show salmon farms destroy wild stocks

Responding to collapsing wild-fish stocks worldwide, the World Bank has hotly promoted "aquaculture" — essentially, large-scale, industrial fish farms. Photo: Simon Bisson The Bank has directed serious resources at promoting fish farming. Such projects make up a significant chunk of its "portfolio of over US$1.2 billion in fisheries, aquaculture, coastal and aquatic environmental management and […]

Sea-level rise could be double IPCC projections

Last year, Nature Geoscience and Science (PDF) published major articles suggesting that the consensus projection for sea-level rise this century was far too low -- and could be as high as five feet. Now the Journal of Glaciology joins in with a remarkable analysis, "Intermittent thinning of Jakobshavn Isbræ, West Greenland, since the Little Ice Age" (PDF).

The lead author, Beata Csatho from the University of Buffalo, explains implications of this work for the traditionally very simplified ice sheet models, such as those used by United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to make projections of sea-level rise:

Hungry humpheads and sustainable fish in U.K. groceries

28 cases of ciguatera fish poisoning have been documented since November. Fish such as grouper, snapper, and amberjack eat toxic algae, and people who eat the contaminated fish can suffer from nausea and vomiting. In serious cases, neurological problems can last for months or years ...

... a federal judge rejected President Bush's exemption of the U.S. Navy to rules regulating sonar ...

... scientists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography suggested that wind may be behind the sardine and anchovy booms and busts off the California coast over the last century ...

Aussies release gruesome footage of Japanese whale hunt

There’s a new twist in the twisty tale of Japan’s off-then-back-on-again whale hunt: the Australian government has released gut-wrenching footage of what it says is a mother and baby minke whale being harpooned and hauled aboard a Japanese ship. An unamused official at Japan’s Institute of Cetacean Research denied that the large and small whales […]