Pacific Spirit Marine Institute
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Like a rock-n-roll guitar player that stands too close to his amplifier, climate change is now creating a dreaded ‘feedback’ affect.
Loss of ice in the Arctic means less ‘white’ which reflects the sunshine back into space. In the summer we wear white or light colored clothing to reflect the heat of the sun away from us. In the winter we wear dark colors that absorb the heat. The tundra is melting absorbing more heat. The heat is rapidly decomposing plant material and in return releasing methane. Methane is over 20 times more potent than other greenhouse gases.
A study done at the University of East Anglia shows that the North Atlantic Ocean is only absorbing half of the C02 it once did, and southern oceans have stopped absorbing it, and are now releasing C02 back into the atmosphere.
The ocean’s ability to absorb C02 is called C02 sink. Merchant ships equipped with instruments to measure carbon dioxide (C02) in the water have been collecting data every month and have generated more than 90,000 measurements in just the past few years.
The North Atlantic Ocean’s ability to absorb C02 abruptly declined, while the Indian Ocean’s absorption ability was making more of a taper.
Emissions of carbon dioxide from the ocean have actually increased by 40% since 1981.
International team leader Dr. Corinne Le Quere, from the University of Eat Anglia and British Antarctic Survey says, “This is serious. All climate models predict that this kind of ‘feedback will continue and intensify during this century.”
See PSMI’s Franken-plankton story in the archive.
Labels: Arctic, Climate Change, Environment, Frankenplankton, Global Warming, Ocean, Phytoplankton, Sea, carbon dioxide, ecosystems, greenhouse gas
© 2009, Pacific Spirit Marine Institute.
Oceans Losing The Ability to Trap CO2, they may be reaching the saturation point.
Monday, September 24, 2007
Adm. Robert F. Willard, U.S. Pacific Fleet commander appears to be in lock-step with with an administration that prefers to operate with the wool pulled over his eyes, or worse an administration that believes it can operate freely by pulling the wool over the eyes of its citizens.
In just one more example, that points to the fact George Orwell was a card-carrying-visionary, we are being asked to swallow ‘revisionist history’.
Willard has stated there is no scientific basis to believe navy sonar is having any affect on sea mammals! The U.S. navy is funding a portion of a $3 million dollar study to determine what if any affect their sonar has on the Beaked Whales, formerly around the Big Island of Hawaii. Formerly? Beaked whales were only spotted 2 times in 17 days off the Kona coast.
$3 million dollars is approximately the cost of 15 minutes…yes, 15 minutes of war in Iraq. Remarkably we are being asked to applaud a 3 million dollar study!
I challenge the twice-speak being dished out by Willard “The frustration and challenge is that we are being asked to put mitigating procedures into place, or to not operate and restrict our freedom of operations, without any foundation whatsoever,” There is a foundation, there is scientific evidence, there is solid and historic data proving military and commercial sonar does have a deleterious affect on sea mammals.
Any 5 year old, would be able to tell you he, wouldn’t make it through his preschool class wearing a blindfold.
It has long been known that whales navigate their terrain using a complicated system of sonar. Sounds are analyzed by a structure in their heads called the ‘melon’. We know for a fact that the sounds produced by whales are used to communicate as well as navigate. The water amplifies the sounds emitted by the whales and these sounds can carry for many hundreds of miles.
In 2005, after listening to the ’songs’ of the whale for 9 long years, Dr. Christopher Clark, Cornell University said, “We now have evidence that they (whales) are communicating with each other over THOUSANDS of miles of ocean….”
The whales use a ‘mental’ map of the sea beds they have charted by sonar, just in the same way ships map the unseen terrain of the sea.
The notion that navy and commercial sonar is adversely affecting all sorts of sea creatures in not a new one and in fact dates back several decades. For us to be asked to again swallow that this concept is one in its infancy is another insult.
If they say it, it must be so? Give us a collective break!
7 years ago several beaked whales washed ashore in the Bahamas. These whales were hemorrhaging blood into their skulls; they beached themselves and died. Why? Another unsolved mystery? The U.S navy was conducting exercises, at that time, in that area, using high intensity sonar!
Did the use of ‘high intensity sonar have anything to do with the injuries and deaths of those whales?
Ask a 5th grader, and save $3 million dollars.
Photo: © Frank Cippriano
Labels: Beaked Whale, Ocean Mammals, Sea, Sea Mammals, Sonar, US Navy, Whales
© 2009, Pacific Spirit Marine Institute.
Beaked Whales Being ‘Blinded’ by Sonar
Sunday, July 22, 2007
A company in California plans to plow a field under the sea with iron dust.
The company, Planktos says it is “possible to boost the ocean’s absorption of carbon dixoide by increasing the production of phytoplankton”.
How much iron do they want to ‘dump’ into the sea? how about a whopping 80 tons?
Where do they want to ‘dump’ their 80 tons of iron particles? 350 miles west of the Galapagos islands in the Pacific Ocean.
Johannah Barry, Galapagos Conservancey says, “it’s still this extraordinary place that contains 95% of its prehuman diversity.”
Planktos intends to drop iron dust into the ocean, feeding plankton and encouraging growth. The ‘restored’ plankton blooms would generate food for sea life. Some plankton would sink and store carbon deep beneath the surface of the sea.
As I’ve said before, I’m not a rocket scientist, but Russ George says I don’t have to be. According to George, “This isn’t rocket science, it’s ocean farming.”
In what sounds like a story that rivals ‘Citizen Kane’ the protagonist in this novel is Russ George. Planktos plans to estimate the amount of carbon dioxide captured by the plankton and sell it on the nascent carbon-trading markets.
Where Kane inserts the words ‘you provide the prose poems, I’ll provide the war” in place of W.R. Hearst’s “You provide the pictures, I’ll provide the war” one could be tempted to imagine George saying, you provide the market, I’ll provide the credits!
Color me dubios yet again. When I wrap my mind around carbon-trading, it falls back on the dot.com boom and bust.
Worse yet carbon-trading leaves me with the bitter taste of the rich man’s war, and the poor man’s fight. pay either $300 or supply a substitute as happened during the US Civil War. Will people like George ultimately turn our oceans into ‘the 300 credit seas’…amassing carbon-credits with which to buy influence.
From the Galapagos to the Vatican, Russ George is a man that seems to be all over the map. Both literally and figuratviely. Billed as CEO of Planktos, and managing director of its ‘forest subsidiary’, KlimaFa, George recently presented Cardinal Paul Poupard a bushel basket of carbon credits. George hopes to make the Vatican the first carbon-neutral sovereign state.
Whoowah!
This carbon-credit donation is coming from not the iron dumpped off the back of a boat near the Galapagos, but from a new “Vatican Climate Forest” planted in Hungary’s Bukk National Park. The dimensions of said ‘Vatican Climate Forest’ will be determined by the Vatican’s 2007 energy usage. Fair enough.
Frankenplankton and carbon-credits as always, follow the money. This idea isn’t passing my Acid Test, if I have to drink the kool aid, I’m going to chase it with a large dose of skepticism.
Labels: Carbon, Carbon-credit, Frankenplankton, Galapagos, Ocean, Plankton, Sea, Vatican, carbon dioxide, carbon-trading market
© 2009, Pacific Spirit Marine Institute.
Frankenplankton: Plans to force feed iron to plankton may create the world’s first Carbon-credit bank.
Monday, July 16, 2007
The leak was from unit 6 which is located at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plant. This unit was already closed by coincidence for maintenance.
Officials at TEPCO, (Asia’s biggest utility) “The contaminated water was released into the ocean and had had no effect on the environment.”
Let’s deconstruct that sentance. Contaminated water. Released ocean. No effect on environment. All-righty then.
After today’s earthquake in Japan I started wondering about nuclear waste being dumped into our oceans.
This isn’t a subject I had given a lot of thought to as I’ve always heard about the controversy surrounding the safe or unsafe containment of Nuclear waste was on land.
Yes, I’ve heard about nuclear powered ocean vessels rotting away in the far reaches of Russia, but I never considered that anyone, under any circumstances, would just drop this poison into the water intentionally…anywhere.
The US dumped an estimated 112,000 drums of nuclear waste into the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans before the Senate declared a moratorium on this bad behaviour in 1982. Of course and sadly, the US isn’t the only country guilty of dumping nuclear waste into the ocean.
Now a new scheme has been hatched. Nuclear waste would be packed in containers and shipped out to sea and then buried.
Greenpeace estimates there are 80 known ocean dump sites where nuclear waste is routinely dropped. This does not account for the millions of litres of radioactive waste being pumped into the ocean from nuclear processing plants.
The Oslo Convention negotiated in 1972 the first regional treaty to regulate the dumping of waste waters at sea. The nuclear industry blocked the inclusion of radioactive wastes within the jurisdiction of the convention. So, while it was deemed illegal to dump organic sewage sludge, dredging spoils and the like, it was perfectly fine to dump radio active waste. Later that same year the London Dumping Convention “high-level” radioactive waste dumping at sea was banned.
Who do we supposed was left to define what was meant by ‘high-level’ waste?
Yes of course… The International Atomic energy Agency! That was too easy wasn’t it?
By the way, that earthquake in Japan? The early official word is, just over 1 liter of radio active water was lost into the ocean. I think I relieved myself of that much liquid after I woke up this morning. Seems like a really small amount. We’ll keep an eye on later numbers.
This of couse was a horrible event and we mean in no way to diminish the loss of life that has occured there. We wish those impacted solace.
Labels: Japan, Nuclear waste, Ocean, Sea, USA, earthquake, radioactive
© 2009, Pacific Spirit Marine Institute.
Earthquake in Japan: 1.5 liters of radioactive water released into sea. No damage done to environment!
Friday, July 13, 2007
The Gray whale that died June 3, in Metchosin after beaching himself probably died from starvation. This young guy was the 5th dead whale, 3 of which were Gray whales, to show up in the area. It was a bad month for the Gray whales.
Dr. Stephen Raverty told The Vancouver Sun he didn’t believe there was a pattern of whale deaths emerging and that it was probably a coincidence…Probably because their bodies weren’t sinking…Probably because they were showing up in more accessible places. Raverty said, “this animal is quite emaciated. It probably starved…”
Probably. I’m not a rocket scientist, I’m not a Gray whale or Grey whale expert, but how many dead gray whales or other species does it take to make a pattern? Pattern or not, one thing is certain; the sea is not a safe place for sea creatures.
A Gray whale washed up in Boundary Bay on May 17th, and a few days later another Gray whale died on the beaches of the Oregon coast.
The dead Oregon Gray whale was a female 5-10 years old. She may have starved to death too. Adding insult to injury, this poor thing was stripped of her baleen on the right side of her jaw after she died. Someone also took parts of her body and skin proving some people have no respect for the dead, let alone the living. In the USA taking marine mammal parts is a federal crime.
Biologists have speculated the emaciated Gray whales had reached their ‘carrying capacity’. Their migration back and forth from Baja California to breed and birth, to the Arctic Circle to eat, requires a huge amount of energy. They need refueling that used to come from the previously nutrient rich, shallow waters of the Chirikov Basin in the north Bering Sea.
Global Warming is having a huge impact on marine health, and the future doesn’t look rosy for the Gray whales. Loss of habitat for food sources are only one cause for alarm, there may loom an even bigger threat from the US, Canada and even Russia to the Gray whale. We’ll look at that tomorrow it’s a biggy.
Labels: Environment, Global Warming, Gray, Gray Whale, Ocean, Ocean Habitat, Sea, Sea Mammals, Whales
© 2009, Pacific Spirit Marine Institute.
Lost habitat in the Sea as well as on Land make living risky. Gray Whales may be Starving!
Monday, June 18, 2007
In the big picture geothermal vents are a fairly recent discovery. Or, are they?
The first of these vents being discovered in the modern days of 1977, new vents are still being found. As the technology advances for deeper and deeper exploration, our ability to find more of these vents increases.
Volcanic conduits heat these geothermal vents. In April a new undersea mineral chimney was discovered off the coast of Costa Rica 8,500 feet below the surface of the water.
This chimney called a “black smoker” was found to be emitting hot iron-darkened water. Scientists from Duke, the University of New Hampshire, and So. Carolina and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts named their discovery the Medusa Hydrothermal Vent Field.
A unique form of jellyfish order, stauromedusae, was found to be living in the mini eco-system produced by the hot waters of these vents. These jellyfish may even be a newly discover species. Their pink color is one unseen before.
The stauromedusae orders of jellyfish generally live further away from the heated vents in cooler water. These vents and now the discovery of life being able to sustain itself in the hotter waters close to the vents are giving scientists a new opportunity to study how living organisms adapt to extreme environmental conditions as well as insights into the origin of the earth’s crust and its evolution.
In addition to the jellyfish there are also heat-tolerant tubeworms living on Medusa’s chimneys.
I’m always amazed when I read stories about things being discovered like this newly named Medusa field and how these things somehow always seem to work back to our earth’s ancient history.
The original Medusa was carrying the child of Poseidon, god of the seas. She offended Athena who turned Medusa’s beautiful hair in the snakes, or was her hair actually turned into tubeworms of the sea?
Her face was then made so hideous that all who looked upon her were turned to stone. Was that stone actually lava flow from beneath the sea?
Poseidon was an angry and hot-tempered type and he carried the trident, with which he could split boulders and cause earthquakes. Modern science now knows this is how these geothermal vents are created, as well as the ocean shelves of the earth’s deep seas.
It’s a wonder to me how ‘myth’ is often times so close to ‘reality’. I stand in constant wonder and awe of the possibilities of our perhaps forgotten past. Were the ancient Greeks and Romans able to explore the depths of the sea? Perhaps the seas were not nearly so deep in our earths ancient past.
Who knows? But, these are interesting things to ponder.
Labels: Black Smokers, Commercial Fishing Nets, Deep seawater, Geothermal Vents, Global Warming, Medusa, Ocean, Ocean Habitat, Sea
© 2009, Pacific Spirit Marine Institute.
Ancient Medusa of the Sea, Modern Medusa of the Sea
