ocean warm bak

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see seal level rise

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Ocean Damage Nearly Doubles the Cost of Climate Change

BY JOHNNY STURGEON

Ignoring the blue economy has left a multi-trillion-dollar blind spot in climate finance, according to a study from Scripps Oceanography.

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ICN 1 26

Ocean Warming Breaks Record for Ninth Straight Year

BY JOHNNY STURGEON

Scientists warn the ocean’s accumulation of energy is fueling extreme weather patterns and destabilizing marine ecosystems.

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ecowatch

Monday, August 12, 2024

“I think calling it climate change is rather limiting. I would rather call it the everything change.” — Margaret Atwood

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Warmest Sea Surface Temperatures in 400 Years Present ‘Existential Threat’ to Great Barrier Reef, Study Finds

Australia’s Great Barrier Reef — the world’s largest coral reef system — has been under critical pressure in recent years, with warming sea surface temperatures leading to mass coral bleaching that threatens its unique biodiversity, ecology and stunning beauty.

Temperatures in the Great Barrier Reef have reached the hottest in more than 400 years, new research has found, presenting an “existential threat” to the UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Read More

Related: 60.5% of World’s Coral Reefs Have Bleached in Past Year, NOAA Says

U.S. Landfills Are Major Sources of Airborne PFAS Pollution, Study Finds

Landfills in the United States — one of the country’s biggest sources of pollution — have been found to contain large amounts of toxic per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) “forever chemicals.”

Read More

Related: Lithium Ion Batteries Could Release PFAS Into Environment, Study Says

U.S. Forest Service Orders Arrowhead Bottled Water to Stop Taking Water From San Bernardino Mountains

The U.S. Forest Service (USFS) has ordered BlueTriton Brands, the company formerly known as Nestlé that bottles and sells bottled water brand Arrowhead Water, to stop drawing water from the San Bernardino Mountains in California.

Read More

Related: California Orders Bottled Water Company to Stop Drawing From Natural Springs Needed for Wildlife Habitat and Wildfire Protection

Building Collisions Are Killing as Many as 1 Billion Birds a Year in the U.S., Study Finds

Less than half of injured or stunned birds survive collisions with windows, new research has found, which means as many as one billion birds may be killed each year from flying into buildings in the United States.that rank. ...

https://www.alternet.org/2022/09/climate-change-supercharging-tropical-cyclones/

https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/great-barrier-reef-bleaching-event/

https://www.alternet.org/2021/04/marine-life/

flee equator

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/scientists-find-new-signs-of-climate-breakdown-in-study-of-warming-oceans

In  a rare calm moment during a historically active Atlantic hurricane season, an international team of climate scientists on Monday published a new study in the journal Nature Climate Change showing that human-caused global heating is making the world's oceans more "stable"—which, as co-author Michael Mann explained, is "very bad news."

Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State, detailed researchers' findings about ocean stratification in a piece for Newsweek. Using "more comprehensive data and a more sophisticated method for estimating stratification changes" than past studies, the scientists found that "oceans are not only becoming more stable, but are doing so faster than was previously thought."

The team—led by Guancheng Li of the Institute of Atmospheric Physics in China—specifically found that stratification globally increased by a "substantial" 5.3% from 1960 to 2018, mostly in the upper 650 feet or so of the world oceans. "This seemingly technical finding has profound and troubling implications," Mann noted.

"The more stable the upper ocean, the less vertical mixing that takes place. This mixing is a primary means by which the ocean buries warming surface waters. So the surface warms up even faster. It's what we call a 'positive feedback'—a vicious cycle," he wrote. "That's bad for a number of reasons."

Thank you to ⁦@MichaelEMann⁩ for patiently and clearly explaining to non scientists why increased ocean stabilizati… https://t.co/yW2BmQhKGp

— Dr Naomi Wolf (@Dr Naomi Wolf)1601306893.0

Noting the ongoing storm season and previous warnings from scientists—including him—that the increasingly devastating recent hurricanes "have fed off warmer surface waters," Mann explained that "a more stably stratified ocean potentially favors more intense, destructive hurricanes." Warmer waters also "absorb less atmospheric carbon dioxide" and "hold less dissolved oxygen."

In other words, the new study indicates that "humans have made the oceans more stable, and the result will be more extreme weather and the acceleration of climate change," as study co-author John Abraham wrote GUK Monday for The Guardian. Like Mann, he detailed the research team's findings about the stratification of the oceans, and the implications. Then, he added:

It is not all doom and gloom. The good news is we know why the climate is changing and we know how the oceans are responding. We can do something about this problem—we have the ability to slow down climate change. We just lack the will and leadership.

But if 2020 has shown us anything, it has revealed that humans can change and adapt quickly to situations. There is hope that we can navigate the challenges resulting from a more stable ocean—but we must start immediately.

Both co-authors' pieces provoked calls for swift, bold, global efforts to address the climate crisis:

Canada has oceans on 3 sides-we can't ignore the climate news that The Oceans Appear to Be Stabilizing. Here's Why… https://t.co/SfWJWWRHr7

— Friends Of Halifax Common (@Friends Of Halifax Common)1601308426.0

"Das bedeutet, dass das CO2-Budget, das zur Vermeidung kritischer Erhitzung (z.B. 1,5°C) übrig bleibt, möglicherwei… https://t.co/675YBTSybJ

— Parents For Future #SystemChangeNotClimateChange (@Parents For Future #SystemChangeNotClimateChange)1601315583.0

Ending his piece on a similar note, Mann wrote that "in short, it's unwise to be complacent given the accumulating scientific evidence that climate change and its impacts may well be in the upper end of the range that climate scientists currently project. There is ever-greater urgency when it comes to acting on climate. But there is agency as well. Our actions make a difference—something to keep in mind as we head into a presidential election whose climate implications are monumental."

Mann is on the mounting list of climate experts and advocates supportingDemocratic presidential nominee Joe Biden in his effort to oust President Donald Trump—who has, at various points, ignored and exacerbated the climate emergency. Earlier this month, the editors ofScientific American as well as the political action arms of both 350 and Friends of the Earth also endorsed the former vice president.

"The stakes are clear and present," Tamara Toles O'Laughlin from 350 Action said of the general election, for which early voting is already underway in some states. "The planet cannot withstand four more years of Trump."

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• :{researchers Warn A Warming Ocean Threatens Giant Kelp Forests:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}:

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https://www.ecowatch.com/5-things-to-know-about-earths-warming-oceans-2644968479.html

1/20

Tara Lohan

Part of Joellen Russell's job is to help illuminate the deep darkness — to shine a light on what's happening beneath the surface of the ocean. And it's one of the most important jobs in the world right now.

Russell is a professor of biogeochemical dynamics at the University of Arizona. From that dry, landlocked state, she's become a leading expert on how the climate is changing in the Southern Ocean — those vast, dark waters swirling around Antarctica.

"This is an age of scientific discovery," she says. But also, "it's very scary what we're finding out."

Researchers like Russell have been ringing alarm bells in report after report warning that the world's ocean waters are dangerously warming. Most of the heat trapped by the greenhouse gas emissions we've spewed into the air for decades has actually been absorbed by the ocean. Over the past 25 years, that heat amounts to the equivalent of exploding 3.6 billion Hiroshima-sized atom bombs, according to Lijing Cheng of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and lead author of a new study on ocean warming.

Now we're beginning to witness the cascading repercussions of that oceanic warming — from supercharged storms to dying coral reefs to crashing fisheries.

There's still a lot left to learn about these problems, but here's a look at some of the top findings from researchers, along with what they hope to uncover next.

1. Yes, It’s Definitely Getting Warmer

There's no doubt among scientists that the ocean is heating and we're driving it.

The latest confirmation is the study by Cheng and colleagues, published this month in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, which bluntly stated, "Ocean heating is irrefutable and a key measure of the Earth's energy imbalance."

The study found ocean waters in 2019 were the warmest in recorded history. And that follows a pattern: The past decade has also seen the warmest 10 years of ocean temperatures, and the last five years have been the five warmest on record.

"Every year the ocean waters get warmer, and the reason is because of the heat-trapping gases that humans have emitted into the atmosphere," says John Abraham, one of the study's coauthors and a professor in mechanical engineering at the University of St. Thomas. "It's concerning for sure."

2. The Southern Ocean Has Been Hit Worst

Much of this warming occurs between the surface and a depth of 6,500 feet. It's happening pretty consistently across the globe, but some areas have experienced higher rates of warming. One of those is the Southern Ocean, which has acted as a giant sink, absorbing 43 percent of our oceanic CO2 emissions and 75 percent of the heat, scientists have concluded.

That's because the ocean basin functions like an air conditioner for the planet, says Russell. Strong winds pull up cold water from deep below, and then the cold surface water takes up some heat from the air. When the winds slow, the water sinks, more cold water rises, and the process repeats.

"The sinking water isn't warm, per se, just a bit warmer than it was when the wind pulled it up," she says. "In this way the Southern Ocean can sequester a lot of heat well below the surface."

For that reason what happens in the Southern Ocean is globally important. And it makes new findings all the more concerning.

Normal upwelling of waters from deep in the Southern Ocean has traditionally brought nutrients to the surface, where they then get moved by the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, the world's strongest ocean current, to feed marine life in other areas. But new research from Russell and colleagues found that this process will be disrupted as warm waters cause the Southern Ocean's ice sheets to melt even faster. This will change the historical upwelling and could trap nutrients instead of pushing them out.

That, she says, will "begin to starve the global ocean of nutrients."

3. A Lot of Changes Are Happening

As bad as that sounds…there's a lot more.

One of the most obvious results of ocean warming is higher sea levels. That's caused in part because water expands as it warms.

But there's also the effect on sea ice. The warmer the water gets, the more ice melts — as is happening in Antarctica. Not surprisingly rates of global sea-level rise are accelerating. This means more property damage, storm surges, and waves lapping at the heels of our coastal communities.

Warmer waters also mean more supercharged storms. An increase in heat drives up evaporation and adds extra moisture to the atmosphere, causing heavy rains, more flooding and more extreme weather events.

it can make drier conditions worse, too. When air rises and cools below the dew point, it turns into clouds or precipitation. "But in places like Arizona or Australia, where rain is generally formed when air is pushed upward over mountains, "the warmer atmosphere might not be cold enough to cause rain," explains Russell. "This is how a warmer atmosphere carrying more moisture might actually rain less in some places — contributing to drought and therefore fire."

The recent study in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences identified warming waters as "one of the key reasons why the Earth has experienced increasing catastrophic fires in the Amazon, California, and Australia in 2019 (extending into 2020 for Australia)."

And that's not all.

Warming ocean waters also contribute to the rise of colonies of algae that can produce toxins deadly to wildlife and sometimes people.

These harmful algal blooms pose a problem even way up in the Gulf of Alaska, where the annual algae season has gotten longer, says Rick Thoman, a climate specialist with the Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Policy at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

"That's all, of course, due to warmer water," he says.

The biggest change in the region may be along the coast of the Bering Sea, where water temperatures have historically been too cold for the blooms to occur — but that's starting to change.

"Now the water temperatures are getting up to the point where they're warm enough to support these harmful algal blooms," Thoman says. Toxins from the blooms can work their way up the food chain and have even shown up in some marine mammals in the areas. "People are concerned about whether it's safe to eat their staple foods," he says.

4. Marine Heat Waves Are Getting Worse

While temperatures are rising across the world's oceans, some areas are also seeing dangerous short-term spikes known as marine heatwaves.

Scientists anticipate that these heatwaves, which can be fatal to a long list of sea creatures, will continue to get more severe and more frequent as the ocean warms. By the end of the century, conditions in some areas may be akin to a permanent heatwave.

That's likely to be bad news for everything from seaweed to birds to mammals, and it could result in fundamental changes for food webs and the animals and coastal economies that depend on those resources.

"Collectively, and over time, an increase in the exposure of marine ecosystems to extreme temperatures may lead to irreversible loss of species or foundation habitats, such as seagrass, coral reefs and kelp forests," a December 2019 study in Frontiers in Marine Science found.

And these changes likely aren't far off. These marine heatwaves "will emerge as forceful agents of disturbance to marine ecosystems in the near-future," the researchers wrote.

We're already seeing what that would look like.

Marine heatwaves off Australia have spurred oyster die-offs and losses to the abalone fishery, and one event in 2016 caught the world's attention when it caused severe bleaching of the biodiverse Great Barrier Reef, triggering mass coral deaths.

And scientists now believe that "the blob," a mass of warm water that persisted off the Pacific Coast from California to Alaska from 2014 to 2016, led to the starvation of an estimated 1 million common murres (Uria aalge) — a normally resilient seabird. The warm waters likely reduced and changed phytoplankton communities — an essential part of the marine food web. But that's not all. The warm waters increased the metabolism — and the appetite — of big fish like pollock and salmon. That demand spike crashed populations of forage fish that murres usually find plentiful.

Tufted puffins, Cassin's auklets, sea lions and baleen whales also suffered losses, although the murres were hit worst.

Most recently a prolonged marine heatwave off the coast of Alaska led to the closure of region's commercial Pacific cod fishery for 2020 — the first time that's ever happened.

"When you cancel whole fisheries, that really impacts people's lives and livelihoods," says Thoman.

5. What We Don’t Know

Scientists have enough information now to tell us that we need to quickly change course. But there's still a lot to learn about how warming temperatures will affect myriad species in the sea, not to mention weather patterns and coastal economies.

One current line of research is to better understand how ocean warming affects weather.

"We know that a warmer ocean means more water evaporates into the atmosphere," says Abraham. "Consequently, it makes the weather more severe because humidity drives storms. We would like to quantify this. So how much worse is weather now and how bad will it be?"

Some of that information will come from existing systems.

"We live in a time of great change, and the ocean is telling us these stories mostly through our incredible Argo floats," says Russell. This global network of nearly 3,900 floating sensors can measure temperature, salinity and pressure at varying depths across the world's oceans.

But in the Southern Ocean, Russell works with an even more advanced group of biogeochemical sensors. They measure nitrates, which can tell researchers about the building blocks of nutrients for the food web. They also measure oxygen, "how the ocean is breathing," she says, and pH, which helps tell the carbon content of the water.

Russell says she'd like to see this technology put to use in more waters around the world.

"We're trying to get a global biogeochemical Argo array, but so far haven't gotten funding for it," she says. "I'm desperate to see the rest of the ocean because it's all connected and it's mixing quickly."

The Arctic, she says, is one place where this technology would play a particularly valuable role.

"It's so shallow in many places, and under ice for so much of the year, that we haven't really been able to get a big float array up there," she says. "But the Arctic is critical to our national interest and it's relatively unstudied. Can you imagine that, in this day and age?"

There's plenty to keep researchers busy, but the rest of us also need to act quickly to reduce greenhouse gas emissions because, the researchers of the Advances in Atmospheric Sciences study concluded, the oceans are so vast that they'll require years to dissipate all of this excess heat and register the changes we're starting to make today. Cutting emissions, they wrote, is the only way to reduce "the risks to humans and other life on Earth."

Reposted with permission from The Revelator.

marine life oceans coral reefs water clean water arctic biodiversity birds climate crisis climate change fish public health science antarctica

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https://www.ecowatch.com/antarctica-doomsday-glacier-water-2644974237.html

scientists have discovered record warm water beneath Antarctica's "doomsday glacier" for the first time, leading to concerns for the glacier whose collapse could contribute nearly a meter (approximately 3 feet) to global sea level rise.

The findings are part of the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration — a UK and U.S.-led research expedition to better understand how quickly the Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica might collapse. On Jan. 8 and 9, researchers drilled a bore hole through the ice, then measured the waters beneath for the first time on Jan. 10 and 11, according to New York University (NYU). They recorded temperatures more than two degrees Celsius above freezing.

"Warm waters in this part of the world, as remote as they may seem, should serve as a warning to all of us about the potential dire changes to the planet brought about by climate change," researcher David Holland, who directs NYU's Environmental Fluid Dynamics Laboratory and NYU Abu Dhabi's Center for Global Sea Level Change, said in the university press release. "If these waters are causing glacier melt in Antarctica, resulting changes in sea level would be felt in more inhabited parts of the world."

The Thwaites Glacier has been called the "doomsday" glacier and the "most important" glacier in the world, BBC News explained. The glacier, roughly the size of Britain or Florida, already contributes four percent a year to global sea level rise. Not only that, it acts as a stop on the rest of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which could raise sea levels by more than three meters (approximately 10 feet).

"It certainly has a big impact on our U.S. coast and in many areas," Twila Moon of the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado Boulder, who is not involved with the Thwaites project, told The New York Times of the glacier.

While satellite data shows that the glacier is rapidly retreating, there has not been an on-the-ground investigation of the glacier until now, BBC News reported. Partly, this is because of how difficult it is to reach. West Antarctica is the stormiest place on Earth, and the glacier is more than 1,000 miles from the closest research station.

Researchers specifically took measurements from the glacier's grounding zone. That's the place where the glacier's ice moves off of bedrock and into the sea, NYU explained. Thwaites is especially precarious because the bed it rests on slopes downward, according to BBC News. As warm water melts the ice between the glacier's surface and the bedrock, the glacier retreats and the ice on top is more likely to break off.

"The fear is these processes will just accelerate," University of Oregon glaciologist Dr. Kiya Riverman told BBC News. "It is a feedback loop, a vicious cycle."

To better understand the grounding zone, the scientists drilled a 600 meter (approximately 1,968.5 feet) hole through the ice and used a device to measure the ocean's temperature and turbulence — a sign of the glacier's fresh water mixing with the salt water of the ocean. This is the first time scientists have measured the ocean beneath Thwaites through a bore hole, and their results so far show they were right to be worried.

"The fact that such warm water was just now recorded by our team along a section of Thwaites grounding zone where we have known the glacier is melting suggests that it may be undergoing an unstoppable retreat that has huge implications for global sea level rise," Holland told NYU.

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an 120

A red-flag warning’: Scientists alarmed by mass death of 1 million seabirds from a hot ocean ‘blob’

Jessica Corbett / Common Dr

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icn 1219

...One intriguing question has been how the loss of Arctic sea ice will affect weather patterns in North America, Europe and Asia.

Melting that much of Earth's icebox could alter wind patterns that shunt weather systems around the Northern Hemisphere, scientists reasoned early in the decade. A study in 2012 suggested a mechanism: Sea ice melt alters the jet stream by reducing the temperature contrast between the Arctic and the mid-latitudes. As the jet stream weakens, it enables areas of rainy weather or hot, dry conditions to linger longer over a given area, leading to extreme rainfall or heat waves and drought.

As the decade ended, studies seemed to support that early conclusion. Research published by Michael Mann, Stefan Rahmstorf and others showed how heat waves, floods and wildfires are linked with a jet stream pattern that, in turn, is related to an over-heated Arctic. In a climate warmed by greenhouse gases, the jet stream is more likely to set up in a pattern that causes extremes to linger longer over Europe and North America.

Arctic Melting Also Effects Ocean Currents

Another major advance in climate research this decade relates to how the melting Arctic will affect a key Atlantic Ocean current that balances Earth's climate by carrying warm, salty water north in the upper layers of the ocean and colder water southward in the ocean depths.

Early in the decade, scientists were still speculating about whether such a slowdown was happening, but now, "for the first time the IPCC has confirmed that the AMOC has slowed down, as predicted by models," Rahmstorf said.

Slowing of the AMOC, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, has been identified as one of the main tipping points in the planet's climate system. Changes in the circulation "have been responsible for some of the strongest and most rapid climate shifts during the Quaternary Period (the past 2.6 million years)," one study said.

[graf/ map currents]

There are already signs that the weakening of the Atlantic circulation is having an effect on U.S. fisheries and storms. Ice melting off Greenland as the Arctic warms is believed to play a key role. Credit: NASA]

Total collapse of the current, still seen as unlikely, would raise sea level by 30 inches around the North Atlantic, but even a slowdown will have a similar effect, to a lesser degree.

"The current is balanced, in part, by the slope of the sea surface as it climbs away from the East coast toward the center of the North Atlantic Ocean gyre," explained Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann. "If the current slows, that slope must decrease, which is accomplished by the sea surface rising along the coast. That can add as much as an extra foot to sea level rise over the next century over parts of the East Coast."

The slowdown will likely push tropical rainfall belts southward, disrupting agriculture and ocean ecosystems. A study in 2016 showed how global warming is shifting other currents in ways that could bring more intense storms to land areas, like the rainstorms that brought record flooding to Japan.

Marine Heat Waves Drive Ecosystem Tipping Points

Scientists have long known that the oceans are absorbing about 93 percent of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases, but it wasn't until the last few years that they showed how that's manifesting in marine heat waves that are driving some ocean ecosystems to tipping points.

The most visible might be the mass die-offs of coral reefs in 2015 and 2016 as the oceans seethed at near record warmth for months on end.

The impacts of another marine heat wave, known as the Pacific warm blob, cascaded through Pacific Ocean ecosystems in 2014 and 2015, causing widespread disruption to the food chain and promoting toxic algae blooms. Another began forming in the Pacific in 2019.

Chart: The Oceans Are Heating Up

Map: Recent Marine Heat Waves

Marine heat waves don't just affect the water. The Pacific warm blob was also linked with California's extreme drought that pushed some inland forest ecosystems past the brink. The large area of stagnant heat over the ocean blocked cooler marine air from reaching the coast, enabling the heat to build up. [WILDFIRES?!]

Since the 1920s, marine heat waves have become 34 percent more frequent, and research shows about 87 percent of them can be attributed to human-caused global warming.

Potential for West Antarctic Ice Sheet Collapse

At the start of the 2010s, scientists were just beginning to understand how vulnerable parts of Antarctica are to human-caused global warming. New studies this past decade showed that what was once considered a nearly invincible fortress of ice is crumbling at the edges.

Just a little more warming could push parts of the Antarctic ice sheets past a tipping point that would raise sea level faster and higher than anticipated by the climate assessments commonly used for coastal planning around the world.

"I'd say one of the big things this decade includes the potential collapse of West Antarctica, based on new research," said University of Colorado climate scientist Mike MacFerrin. "Just this year, we have evidence that Antarctica's recent speedup of ice loss is, in fact, human-caused."

Concerns about an abrupt collapse of parts of Antarctica's ice shelves intensified in 2016 with a study suggesting that water from surface melting could seep deep into the ice, refreeze and split off huge slabs of the shelves in a relatively short time. Radar surveys showing the thinning of the Thwaites Glacier helped trigger a massive international research effort to track the melting in that area, and scientists are also watching the Pine Island Glacier for signs of disintegration.

The worst-case tipping point scenarios shouldn't be off the table, said Jason Box, a  climate scientist with the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland.

Box said the research showing destabilization of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is a key climate science advance of this past decade "that should have been like a real wake-up call moment," he said.

Connecting Climate Change to Weather Extremes

Only a few years ago, scientists were reluctant to connect any specific extreme weather event to global warming.

In 2011 and 2012, Rahmstorf and other scientists triggered debates when they wrote that there was strong evidence linking specific events or an increase in their numbers to the human influence on climate. Since then, scientists who specialize in attribution research have found global warming fingerprints on nearly every heat wave they've studied.

"Looking back over the past decade, it's astonishing how firmly we've moved out to the tails of the probability distribution. Extremes are common and are commonly attributed to human activities," said Oregon State University climate researcher Philip Mote. "We're living the worst-case scenario."

[graf]

One area of research during the 2010s with ominous findings was how global warming affects the intensity tropical storms, including North Atlantic hurricanes that affect the densely populated East Coast of the U.S. A 2016 study tracked a persistent shift of storm tracks toward that area.

"We've seen extreme events, with every major ocean basin having at least one big, catastrophic hurricane in the last few years," said NOAA climate scientist Deke Arndt. "We had Dorian and Michael, with rapid intensification so early in its development and close to the equator," he said. "Every basin has come up with monstrous storms."

Seeing the Risks, More Scientists Are Speaking Out...

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ew 1219

The climate crisis is hurting the New England fishing industry, claims a new report published Monday, with a decline of 16% in fishing jobs in the northeastern U.S. region from 1996 to 2017 and more instability ahead.

University of Delaware researcher Kimberly Oremus' paper, "Climate variability reduces employment in New England fisheries," was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"This is an important signal to incorporate into the fisheries management process," Oremus told Science X. "We need to figure out what climate is doing to fisheries in order to cope with it."

Oresmus found that the fishing industry is in trouble due to variations in ocean temperature. Of particular concern is the Gulf of Maine, an area of the ocean warming faster than nearly any other in the world.

"New England waters are among the fastest-warming in the world," said Oremus said. "Warmer-than-average sea-surface temperatures have been shown to impact the productivity of lobsters, sea scallops, groundfish and other fisheries important to the region, especially when they are most vulnerable, from spawning through their first year of life."

As The New Food Economy explained, the New England fish

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A Minefield of Purple Urchins Devastated Kelp Forests in California: Warm water and “sea star wasting disease” helped urchins take over the coast, a new study finds. 11/19 see Seastar wasting update 3/18UCSC research on starfish disease 11/13. Mysterious epidemic devastates starfish population off the Pacific Coast (video) PBS 1/14. You can help do citizen science research. More opportunities. LOE audio. Oregon 6/14. 5/15 update.

A Minefield of Purple Urchins Devastated Kelp Forests in California: Warm water and “sea star wasting disease” helped urchins take over the coast, a new study finds. 11/19 see Seastar wasting update 3/18UCSC research on starfish disease 11/13. Mysterious epidemic devastates starfish population off the Pacific Coast (video) PBS 1/14. You can help do citizen science research. More opportunities. LOE audio. Oregon 6/14. 5/15 update.

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no lnx

‘Boiling with methane’: Scientists reveal ‘truly terrifying’ sign of climate change under the Arctic Ocean

A spectacular image of methane bubbles rising above a cold seep site. Methane bubbles flow in a small stream out of the sediment on an area of seafloor offshore Virginia north of Washington Canyon. Quill worms, anemones, patches of bacterial mat, pandalid shrimp, and a large red crab (Chaceon quinquedens) can be seen in and along the periphery of the seepage area.

Written by Jessica Corbett / Common Dreams October 9, 2019

Scientists studying the consequences of methane emissions from underwater permafrost in the Arctic Ocean announced this week that they found a 50-square-foot area of the East Siberian Sea “boiling with methane bubbles.”

“This is the most powerful seep I have ever been able to observe,” lead scientist Igor Semiletov said Monday, using a term for methane gas bubbling up from the seafloor to the surface. “No one has ever recorded anything similar.”

Semiletov, a Russian researcher who has participated in 45 Arctic expeditions, set out on the Academic Mstislav Keldysh last month, accompanied by scientists from the United Kingdom, the United States, Italy, the Netherlands, and Sweden.

Their discovery was announced in a statement from Russia’s Tomsk Polytechnic University, where Semiletov is a professor. The researchers’ findings from the expedition and Semiletov’s remarks were translated and reported on Tuesday by The Telegraph.

Russian scientists find ‘most powerful’ ever methane seep in Arctic Ocean https://t.co/v6HrbjPlXv

— Telegraph World News (@TelegraphWorld) October 8, 2019

Permafrost is a mix of soil, rocks, and sand bound together by ice that stays frozen for two or more years straight. As human activity causes global temperatures to rise, the world’s permafrost is thawing—releasing ancient bacteria and viruses as well as greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane that further heat the planet.

Compared with carbon dioxide, methane has a shorter lifetime in the atmosphere but is better at trapping radiation, so methane’s impact is more than 25 times greater than that of carbon dioxide over a 100-year period, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Experts are increasingly concerned about the consequences of thawing permafrost that is located both beneath land and water in the planet’s coldest regions. Last week, the Washington Post reported on “stunning and dramatic” scenes from a region of Eastern Siberia where “sections of many older, wooden buildings already sag toward the ground—rendered uninhabitable by the unevenly thawing earth,” and “rivers are rising and running faster,” sweeping away entire neighborhoods.

The Academic Mstislav Keldysh expedition’s research team, led by Semiletov, traveled to an area of the Arctic Ocean known for methane “fountains” to study the effects of permafrost thawing. Around the “powerful” fountain they found east of Bennett Island, the concentration of methane in the atmosphere was more than nine times higher than the global average.

Describing the researchers’ discovery of the fountain based on the univeristy’s statement, The Telegraph reported:

When researchers drew near to the “emerald-colored” water of the methane fountain, they “could see how gas was rising to the surface from the black depths of the sea in thousands of bubbly strands,” according to expedition member Sergei Nikiforov.

They took samples of bottom sediments, water, and gas, scooping up the extraordinarily large methane bubbles in buckets rather than small plastic capsules and filling several pressurized canisters.

The next day, the expedition stumbled upon another giant seep of roughly the same size, even though discovering seeps among rough ocean waves is usually “harder than finding a needle in a haystack,” Mr. Nikiforov said.

The expedition’s findings, also reported on Tuesday by Newsweek, elicited alarmed reactions from readers and climate activists the world over:

Our seas are starting to ‘boil’ — with methane. This is not normal. #ClimateCrisis #ArcticMatters #UniteBehindTheScience https://t.co/ATk7IzFuSi

— Callum Grieve (@callumgrieve) October 9, 2019

Oh, fuck. https://t.co/OnwCW2rL2c

— Ray Monk (@Raymodraco) October 8, 2019

A New Zealand chapter of the Extinction Rebellion movement—which launched a fresh wave of peaceful acts of civil disobedience around the world on Monday to demand bolder climate policies—tweeted in response to the expedition’s discovery, “This is why the disruption we caused is very minor in comparison to what’s coming.”

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Climate Change Threatens the World’s Fisheries, Food Billions of People Rely On

BY GEORGINA GUSTIN

ICN 919

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/the-blob-a-marine-heatwave-larger-than-alaska-is-wreaking-havoc-on-marine-life-and-the-worst-may-be-yet-to-come/

no lnx

The Blob: A marine heatwave larger than Alaska is wreaking Written by Nicole Karlis / Salon September 27, 2019

In the fall of 2013, scientists in Washington noticed a strange physical phenomenon surfacing in the Pacific Ocean — a vast patch of unusually warm water moving through the Pacific. For a year, from 2014 to 2015, this odd mass of water — known colloquially as “The Blob” — had horrible repercussions for marine life: thousands of sea lion pups were beached and starved, and The Blob created the first ever mass bleaching event for Hawaii’s coral reefs. Now, scientists are on high alert as they observe the second largest blob on record, one that, at its current growth rate, could exceed the original blob.

While “The Blob’s” name is reminiscent of the 1958 science-fiction horror movie about a fictitious blob that eats everything in its path, the real-life marine heatwave blob should inspire just as much horror. When the 2014 blob was first discovered, it was 500 miles wide and 300 feet deep; at its peak, it expanded to be 1,000 miles long, 1,000 miles wide and 300 feet deep. The 2014 blob wreaked havoc with the West Coast marine ecosystem — slowing down salmon returns, and likely fueling for strange weather patterns across the country.

The new blob, officially called the Northeast Pacific Marine Heatwave of 2019, is, like the original, situated in a vast swath of ocean off the west coast of the U.S. and Canada. Dr. Andrew Leising, a research scientist at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Fisheries’ Southwest Fisheries Science Center and developer of a marine heatwave tracker, told Salon its size is currently around 8 million square kilometers.

“For reference, Alaska is not quite 2 million kilometers squared,” Leising says. “It’s like 4 times the size of Alaska.”

The original blob, at its peak, was just under 10 million square kilometers, he added, but that one took much longer to grow: that blog was brought to the attention of scientists in fall 2013, and peaked in late fall 2014 and early winter of 2015. The new Northeast Pacific Marine Heatwave of 2019 is growing bigger at a faster rate, in terms of both size and intensity: in the new blob, ocean surface temperatures are as much as 3 °C above average. For comparison, the temperature of the original blob was, in February 2014, around 2.5 °C warmer than the usual temperature for that time of year.

According to NOAA, The Blob’s emergence over the last few months is due to high atmospheric pressure which dampened the winds that cool the ocean’s surface.

“The current one has only been around for a little over 100 days, and it is closing in on intensity and how warm it is,” Leising said. “The growth rate is nearly double.”

Yet there is one big difference between the original blob and the current blob: the depth of the heatwave. The new blob currently extends 30 meters below the ocean’s surface. The original blob stretched down as deep as 150 meters.

Leising said this difference in depth “might explain why it is growing so rapidly.”

Still, researchers fear The Blob will again disturb the marine ecosystem. Off the coast of Washington, the heatwave has moved onshore, messing with coastal temperatures and salmon migration. Scientists say warmer water temperatures shift distribution of predators, which in turn can cause lower returns of salmon.

Ultimately, such marine heatwave events can cripple the food supply in the affected areas.

“As temperatures warm up there is less food for everything — any animal species, but especially the smaller ones,” Leising says. That includes humans, who rely on fisheries for much seafood.

Jamison Gove, a research oceanographer at NOAA’s Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center, told Salon that Hawaii has begun to see coral bleaching — a phenomenon which he believes is linked to the current blob.

“We are starting to see coral bleaching,” Gove said. “There are some places that are worse than others.”

Some of the reefs experiencing bleaching have barely had a chance to recover from the last Blob-induced bleaching event in 2015. As it takes corals 10 to 15 years to recover from a major bleaching event, a new bleaching so soon after the previous is a major setback for the recovery process.

A loss of coral around Hawaii has multiple ramifications. It means that the fish that call the coral reefs home are more vulnerable. Coral reefs also break up incoming waves and storms before reaching the coastline.

“Ninety percent of wave energy is blocked because of reefs, and without that blocking, these storms would impact our coastlines,” Gove said.

In the process of coral bleaching, warm ocean temperatures expel the algae that provide coral with their energy. Bleaching is not necessarily a death sentence for coral reefs: reefs can survive 3 to 4 weeks after, and even live again if ocean conditions return to normal and algae returns.

The previous blob also spawned destructive algae blooms on the West Coast — an environmentally ruinous event that may recur with this new blob. That blob’s algae bloom shut down crabbing and clamming for months.

The good news is that California’s coastal waters are holding the current blob offshore, and a change in atmospheric conditions could rectify the situation.

The new blob follows the trend of strange weather patterns that all relate to climate change. There is a band of high pressure stretching from the Bering Sea to Alaska, two regions that have been unusually warm in recent years. Leising fears that eventually, “everything is going to be a heatwave.”

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ocean warming, demoic acid, loss of food

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Ocean Is Screaming': What Killed Thousands of Seabirds on an Arctic Island?

BY: SABRINA SHANKMAN

The story of the puffins’ deaths likely starts at the bottom of the food chain, where warming water and climate change are changing the menu.

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omg (whales starve off CA no food)

Pompeo actually just cheered the ‘new opportunities’ presented by the Arctic’s melting ice sheets

by Cody Fenwick May 6, 2019

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has never been terribly worried about climate change, but in a new speech to the Arctic Council Ministerial Meeting in Finland on Monday, he seemed…

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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/24042019/climate-change-fish-local-extinction-marine-species-hit-harder-land-animals-study-nature

Sea creatures, especially those that live in shallower water near the coasts, are much more vulnerable to global warming than land animals, new research shows. The scientists found that local populations of marine animals are disappearing at double the rate of land-based species.

That's because marine animals like fish, crabs and lobster are already more likely to be living near the threshold of life-threatening temperatures, and because in the ocean, there are fewer places to hide from extreme heat, said Malin Pinsky, lead author of a new study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

"These results are stunning, in part because the impacts of climate change on ocean life were virtually ignored just a decade ago," said Pinsky, an ocean researcher at Rutgers University. The study took a close look at cold-blooded marine species whose body temperatures are dependent on their surroundings.

Some fish can move poleward to cooler waters, but for others, those thermal refuges will be inaccessible because the cooler areas are too far away or because shallow water habitat along continental shelves is not continuous. That can affect people in developing countries that depend heavily on fish as a daily source of food.

Understanding which creatures are most at risk allows scientists and fisheries managers to better allocate resources for conservation, Pinsky said.

"We already know terrestrial species are highly vulnerable to climate change," he said, "and now we see that marine species are even more vulnerable."

Some Fish Already Reaching Thermal Limits

Locally caught fish are an important source of protein for about half the world's population, and the new study shows that some of those species near the equator are among the most vulnerable to global warming because they already live near the edge of their heat tolerance.

"We're heading into uncharted territories. We're already seeing species disappear from places they've been for generations and longer," Pinsky said.

For example, damselfish and cardinalfish, two small species that live on coral reefs, already live near their thermal limits and have started to disappear from some areas, which contributes to the overall decline of coral reef health.

Off the coast of North Carolina, summer flounder are another example, Pinsky said. They have moved so far to find cooler waters that it's had a big effect on fisheries, with boats having to travel more than 600 miles farther north to catch the species.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/us-scientists-say-marine-heatwaves-are-sweeping-the-globe-and-that-it-is-unstoppable/

Unstoppable. What a horrific word and yet that is what climate scientists say is happening with marine heat waves, these events are seriously damaging life in the oceans.

The oceans have been doing humans a massive favor by taking in over 40-60% more heat than previously thought according to peer research published in the journal Nature. Missing sixty percent of temperature rise over 25 years is a BFD.

Oceans take in 93% of all heat that is trapped by greenhouse gas emissions and stores it below the surface – suggesting even faster rates of damage from greenhouse gases. That fact is why humans have been able to delude themselves that everything is ok with the climate because the oceans have been taking in the intense heat that we otherwise would be feeling or dying. But now that heat has begun to be released, and we can see the evidence in stronger cyclones, more drought, flooding, and heatwaves.

According to the study, this warming water means that there is even less time to reduce CO2 emissions, more threats to coral reefs and kelp forests, faster sea level rise from thermal expansion, more rapid melting of the great ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica, more damaging hurricanes, and more significant Nor’easters.

The warming oceans have begun to wreak havoc on marine life. In a nutshell, ocean warming is smothering the oceans.

Laura Poppic writes in Scientific American:

Escaping predators, digestion and other animal activities—including those of humans—require oxygen. But that essential ingredient is no longer so easy for marine life to obtain, several new studies reveal.

In the past decade ocean oxygen levels have taken a dive—an alarming trend that is linked to climate change, says Andreas Oschlies, an oceanographer at the Helmholtz Center for Ocean Research Kiel in Germany, whose team tracks ocean oxygen levels worldwide. “We were surprised by the intensity of the changes we saw, how rapidly oxygen is going down in the ocean and how large the effects on marine ecosystems are,” he says.

It is no surprise to scientists that warming oceans are losing oxygen, but the scale of the dip calls for urgent attention, Oschlies says. Oxygen levels in some tropical regions have dropped by a startling 40 percent in the last 50 years, some recent studies reveal. Levels have dropped more subtly elsewhere, with an average loss of 2 percent globally.

From Phys.org:

The largest extinction in Earth’s history marked the end of the Permian period, some 252 million years ago. Long before dinosaurs, our planet was populated with plants and animals that were mostly obliterated after a series of massive volcanic eruptions in Siberia.

Fossils in ancient seafloor rocks display a thriving and diverse marine ecosystem, then a swath of corpses. Some 96 percent of marine species were wiped out during the “Great Dying,” followed by millions of years when life had to multiply and diversify once more.

What has been debated until now is exactly what made the oceans inhospitable to life—the high acidity of the water, metal and sulfide poisoning, a complete lack of oxygen, or simply higher temperatures.

New research from the University of Washington and Stanford University combines models of ocean conditions and animal metabolism with published lab data and paleoceanographic records to show that the Permian mass extinction in the oceans was caused by global warming that left animals unable to breathe. As temperatures rose and the metabolism of marine animals sped up, the warmer waters could not hold enough oxygen for them to survive.

The study is published in the Dec. 7 issue of Science.

From International Business Times:

Malin Pinsky, a professor at Rutgers University, also said that the events would most likely become more common and turn even more severe unless society reduces greenhouse gas emissions. What is even more alarming is that record-breaking events related to global warming have started becoming “normal.” Such big hits may eventually have long-lasting and detrimental effects.

“In the space of one week, scientific publications have underscored that unless we take evasive action, our future oceans will have fewer fish, fewer whales and frequent dramatic shifts in ecological structure will occur, with concerning implications for humans who depend on the ocean,” Dr. Éva Plagányi of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in Australia said. She also claimed that oceanic heat waves are like wildfires.

A Rutgers-led study in the journal Science today supports this as researchers found that climate change has profound effects already on fisheries across the globe. The study claims that as much as 15 percent to 35 percent decline in fisheries swept the East China Sea and the North Sea. Similarly, ocean warming also contributed to a drop in sustainable catches. From 1930 to 2010, the estimated decline is around 4.1 percent for many species of shellfish and fish.

“We were stunned to find that fisheries around the world have already responded to ocean warming,” Pinsky said. He co-authored the study.

All hands on deck, the climate is in more trouble than we thought. Again, we are destroying the foundation of life as we know it, and doing it in record time. This news is not a shiny new object such as a bigot calling somebody a repulsive name or the brouhaha over Representative Omar. I suppose it all depends on what outrages someone. Unfortunately for everyone on earth, we will pay a deadly price for our willful ignorance and apathy.

Many scientists say that we can slow down the damage if we decarbonize rapidly. We could save some of what is left. A 3C world will be a hell of a lot better than an 8C.

I have no doubt the 2020 election will be about climate change, Republicans want the country to mock and laugh at us so they will make it an issue, and Democrats are nervous of a backlash.

A backlash could happen, but the thing is, this summer and the summer of 2020 are going to be godawful hot with storms and wildfires. Voters will be swayed with their own eyes. This election is our last chance, we have run out of time to dither any longer. The GOP is taking a huge risk on mocking the science.

Removing CO2 from the atmosphere is the only thing that can save us now, but the technology is not ready and more than likely not available for decades. Decades we don’t have.

For the oceans, there is no way we can ever remove the excess heat. But it will be released. Be sure to hug your children and grandchildren a little tighter.

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'Scary': Warming of Oceans Is Equivalent to 1.5 Atomic Bombs Every Second Over Past 150 Years

By Julia Conley

Carbon emissions are affecting life in all of Earth's ecosystems—contributing to drought, flooding and the melting of ice in the Arctic and Antarctic regions. But a new study by researchers at Oxford University details how the planet's oceans are by far the climate crisis's biggest victim, with implications for the global population.

...

The Guardian made that calculation after examining the report, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences—and alarmed the study's lead author, who confirmed it was accurate.

"I try not to make this type of calculation, simply because I find it worrisome," Prof. Laure Zannat told the Guardian. "We usually try to compare the heating to [human] energy use, to make it less scary."

But Zannat's preferred calculation was hardly less troubling, with the study finding that the heating of the oceans from 1871 to the present day is also equivalent to 1,000 times the energy used by the entire global population every year.

With carbon emissions rising in recent decades, up 60 percent since 1990, the warming oceans can be compared to the effects of three atomic bombs, like the ones that decimated Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, per second since that year.

As researchers have reported in recent years, the world's oceans absorb more than 90 percent of the carbon emissions caused by oil and gas drilling, agriculture, and other human activity.

Most of the heat the Oxford University researchers studied is being stored deep in the world's oceans, causing sea level rise and making hurricanes and tsunamis stronger and more destructive.

"Obviously, we are putting a lot of excess energy into the climate system and a lot of that ends up in the ocean. There is no doubt," Zanna told the Guardian.

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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/23092018/antarctica-warming-southern-ocean-human-greenhouse-gas-ozone-ice-loss-study

Southern Ocean around Antarctica is warming at an alarming rate—twice that of the rest of the world's oceans. Now, researchers have developed more powerful evidence pointing to the human causes.

Though warming had been observed in the past, there was little historical data to allow scientists to pinpoint the causes with much certainty.

In a new study, researchers used climate models, the past observations that did exist and data flowing in from new ocean-going sensors to show how greenhouse gas emissions and the depletion of ozone in the atmosphere have led to both a warming of the Southern Ocean and an increase in its freshwater content. The findings also rule out natural variability as a major source of those changes.

"The observed warming is due to human influence," said oceanographer Neil Swart, a research scientist with Environment and Climate Change Canada who led the study, published Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience. "That may have been suspected or proposed before, but this is the evidence that really proves it."

Ocean-Going Floats and Climate Models

The Southern Ocean is notoriously inhospitable, clogged with ice and home to rough seas and weather. As a result, there weren't many measurements in the past.

In 2004, a partnership of 30 countries across the world launched the Argo program to improve what's known about the world's oceans, and now there are close to 4,000 programmable floats collecting data in the oceans worldwide. That is helping improve what's known, but the lack of complete data going back decades has, in the past, left researchers wondering if their conclusions were robust....

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global wrming atlantic

currents circulation

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/07052018/atlantic-ocean-circulation-slowing-climate-change-heat-temperature-rainfall-fish-why-you-should-care

Scientists have found new evidence that the Atlantic Ocean's circulation has slowed by about 15 percent since the middle of the last century. If it continues to slow, that could have profound consequences for Earth's inhabitants.

Studies suggest it would mean much colder winters and hotter summers in Europe, changing rainfall patterns in the tropics, and warmer water building up along the U.S. coast that can fuel sea level rise and destructive storms. The changes in the North Atlantic could also intensify streams of icebergsinto shipping lanes and coastal ice jams that hinder navigation.

There are already signs that the weakening is having an effect. In 2015, scientists traced the imminent collapse of the commercially important cod fishery in the region to rapidly warming water in the Gulf of Maine, which fits the pattern of slowing Atlantic circulation. Record-warm water off the East Coast that helped fuel 2011's destructive Hurricane Irene, as well as Superstorm Sandy a year later, appears to fit that pattern, as well, according to NASA.

So what exactly is going on here?

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Tyson Foods Linked to the Largest Toxic Dead Zone in U.S. History America's largest meat producer must clean up its act. 10/17 see Meat and Ocean.

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https://www.ecowatch.com/marine-extinction-warming-2494757460.html

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