Ocean Deserts Source of GHG

Dead zones contribute to climate change

Hypoxic Waters Elevate Greenhouse Gasses in the Atmosphere

A University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science oceanographer says  that the increased amount of nitrous oxide (N2O) produced in aquatic dead zones, low-oxygen (hypoxic) waters, increases concentrations of the potent GHG in the atmosphere, worsening the impacts of global warming and contributing to the widening of ozone “holes” that allow harmful UV radiation through.

Eutrophication in the Sea of Azov.  Eutrophication is caused by human activity. (Source: NASA).

“As the volume of hypoxic waters move towards the sea surface and expands along our coasts, their ability to produce the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide increases,” explains Dr. Codispoti of the UMCES Horn Point Laboratory. “With low-oxygen waters currently producing about half of the ocean’s net nitrous oxide, we could see an additional significant atmospheric increase if these ‘dead zones’ continue to expand.”

N2O, a highly potent greenhouse gas, is present in minute concentrations in Earth’s atmosphere, and is now a major factor in the destruction of the stratospheric ozone layer. “For the past 400,000 years, changes in atmospheric N2O appear to have roughly paralleled changes in carbon dioxide CO2 and have had modest impacts on climate, but this may change. Just as human activities may be causing an unprecedented rise in the terrestrial N2O sources, marine N2O production may also rise substantially as a result of nutrient pollution, warming waters and ocean acidification. Because the marine environment is a net producer of N2O, much of this production will be lost to the atmosphere, thus further intensifying its climatic impact,” a UMC news release said.

As dissolved oxygen levels decline in coastal waters, the N2O production increases. “Under well-oxygenated conditions, microbes produce N2O at low rates. But at oxygen concentrations decrease to hypoxic levels, these waters can increase their production of N2O.”

Shallow suboxic and hypoxic waters produce high rates of N2O “because respiration and biological turnover rates are higher near the sunlit waters where phytoplankton produce the fuel for respiration.”

“When suboxic waters (oxygen essentially absent) occur at depths of less than 300 feet, the combination of high respiration rates, and the peculiarities of a process called denitrification can cause N2O production rates to be 10,000 times higher than the average for the open ocean. The future of marine N2O production depends critically on what will happen to the roughly ten percent of the ocean volume that is hypoxic and suboxic.

“Nitrous oxide data from many coastal zones that contain low oxygen waters are sparse, including Chesapeake Bay,” said Dr. Codispoti. “We should intensify our observations of the relationship between low oxygen concentrations and nitrous oxide in coastal waters.”

The article “Interesting Times for Nitrous Oxide” appears in the March 12, 2010 edition of the journal Science.

University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science

Related Links:

• Eutrophication and Hypoxia
• Our oceans are dying
• The Eight Steps that Help Kill More of Our Fish

STOP Killing Our Oceans!

Thousands of marine mammals, sea turtles, seabirds and others, are choked or poisoned each year by eating trash discarded in the ocean… —Report

In a week that another tourist cruise ship on its way to destroy what is left of the fragile Antarctic ecosystems breaks down, giving the thousands of passengers time to reflect on their destructive behavior,  a report by U.S.-based Ocean Conservancy provides a “global snapshot of marine debris,” a record of garbage collected by about 400,000 volunteers in 104 countries and locations  in a single day in September 2008.

Tourism: A Major Destructive Force

P&O Aurora (in the background) passenger Reg Hirst and his wife (not picture) from Yorkshire, England, were among the 2,000 tourists whose trip around New Zealand was disrupted by a broken propeller on the ship. They had to stay in Auckland for a few nights (not as nice as Sydney, they said) but that’s no problem because there’s lots more to do on the way to San Francisco. Photo by JOHN SELKIRK/Dominion Post. Image may be subject to copyright.

The MV Aurora is owned and operated by P&O Cruises (now a part of Carnival Corporation). The ship has a Gross Registered Tonnage (GRT) of 76,152 tonnes and is 270 m long. It can carry about 2,000 passengers and a crew of about 900.  Aurora produces an estimated 6,500 tons of garbage and human waste and 100,000,000 liters of graywater each year. Aurora’s 4 engines produce about 60,000 kW of power enough to provide electricity for about  7,000 households. The carbon footprint for Aurora (full operation mode inclusive of passenger activities) is an estimated 500,000 tons of CO2 per year. In February alone, a staggering 25  cruise ships visited Auckland, New Zealand.

The highlights of the Ocean Conservancy report, a Rising Tide of Ocean Debris, is listed below.

1.  A tidal wave of ocean debris is a major pollution problem of the 21st century.

2.  Certain categories of debris show up more often in certain places.

3.  Of the 43 items tracked during the Cleanup, the top three items of trash found in 2008 were cigarette butts, plastic bags, and food wrappers/containers.

4. Marine debris kills. Every year, thousands of marine mammals, sea turtles, seabirds, and other animals are sickened, injured, or killed because of trash in the ocean. Animals choke or become poisoned when they eat trash, and drown when they become entangled in bags, ropes, and old fishing gear.

5.  Marine debris degrades ocean health and compromises its ability to adapt [sic] to climate change.

Full report is available for download at A Rising Tide of Ocean Debris and

For more information, visit their site at Ocean Conservency: Start a Sea Change.

Related Links:

• Our Oceans: Wild Facts Series
• Collapsing Fisheries
• Dead Zones: Eutrophication and Hypoxia
• Human Impact: That’s Mars’ Sister!
• To & From New Zealand: Double Act of Eco-Terrorism

• Emergency Warning to Tourists Visiting New Zealand
• Stop New Zealand Committing Eco-Terrorism!

• Oceans, Where Life Started, Are Dying – Part III
• None Shall Sleep!

Who needs Chesapeake crabs?

Our Oceans, where life started Are Now Dying!

What is killing them? Among major causes Pollution from

• Tourism
• Coastal Developments
• Industrial agriculture
• Intensive farming
• Coal-burning power plants
• Shipping
• Dumping

Causing

• Eutrophication and Hypoxia
• Desertification
• Acidification
• Dead Zones

Our Dead Zone Largest Ever This Year!

Ocean “deserts” are expanding much faster than predicted, it is believed that the ocean “desertification” may result in the population decline of many fish species.

Black areas in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans are the least productive. (Credit NOAA)

Development takes toll on Chesapeake crabs

Wed Mar 4, 2009
By Andy Sullivan

REEDVILLE, Virginia (Reuters) – It doesn’t look like a disaster area.

Crab boats dart back and forth on this inlet of the Chesapeake Bay as they have for generations. On the shore, million-dollar vacation homes catch the morning sun.

But watermen aren’t pulling blue crabs out of the Bay this winter. After years of decline, the U.S. Commerce Department declared the fishery a federal disaster last September and Maryland and Virginia shut it down until spring.

It was a symbolic as well as an economic blow for the men who harvest the region’s defining culinary treat.

Watermen faced a stark choice: Stay ashore until March, or take a state job pulling abandoned crab traps and other junk from the bottom of the Bay.

So on this frigid winter morning, Spencer Headley is on cleanup duty, a floating janitor on one of the country’s most intractably polluted bodies of water.

It’s decent money — $300 a day plus expenses — and you can’t beat those government hours. But Headley, 32, wonders why he must now rely on the state rather than the water for his livelihood.

“We’re not trying to tear the Bay up. We’re just trying to make a living off a fishery that’s been going for more than 100 years,” he says, one eye on his sonar display.

“Why all of a sudden is it a disaster?”

The Susquehanna River, which enters the Chesapeake Bay at its northern end, carries 40 percent of the nitrogen that flows into the Bay—the largest single source. There is so much nitrogen in the northern Bay that algae have all the “fertilizer” they need, and changes in streamflow do little or nothing to affect the growth of algal blooms. This satellite image shows brown water flowing from the Susquehanna. (NASA image by Robert Simmon, based on Landsat-7 data provided by the UMD Global Land Cover Facility. Caption: Earth Observatory).

STEADY STREAM OF POLLUTANTS

That disaster has been steadily building since Europeans first mapped the Bay’s shores 400 years ago.

Stretching roughly 200 miles from northern Maryland to southern Virginia, the Chesapeake is the largest estuary in the United States and for hundreds of years was one of its most productive fisheries, yielding shad, sturgeon, oysters and baitfish. As recently as 1993, the Bay accounted for about half of the country’s blue crab harvest.

But the fishery has declined as the region has boomed. Roughly 16.6 million people live in its watershed, which stretches as far as upstate New York, and an average of 439 more move to the region each day. That means more houses and more traffic as urban sprawl eats up forests and farmland.

The impact of this growth can be seen along Sligo Creek, which draws herons and foxes to its banks as it winds through the densely packed suburbs northeast of Washington, D.C.

Along the way, the creek picks up a steady stream of pollutants: lawn fertilizer, pet feces, motor oil and silt, washing off the parking lots and other hard surfaces that cover 35 percent of its 12-square-mile watershed.

Local activist Bruce Sidwell points out a sewer line that runs across the creek, exposed by years of erosion. It could be leaking raw sewage before long.

Sidwell’s grass-roots group reports polluters and organizes litter pickups, and he’s eager to showcase the filtering pools that help clean the creek’s upper reaches.

But water quality remains poor and is not likely to improve without substantial changes in the landscape, Sidwell says.

“It would take quite an effort to get it up to ‘fair’ water quality,” he says.

On its journey to the Chesapeake, water from Sligo Creek mingles with runoff from farms and sewage treatment plans.

Nitrogen and phosphorus in that runoff feed massive algae blooms that suck oxygen out of the water each summer, killing clams and worms that provide the blue crab with food and aquatic grasses that give it shelter.

Last year, the “dead zone” covered 40 percent of the Bay.

Not surprisingly, crabs have suffered. The 2007 catch was the worst in recorded history, and last year the catch was even worse in Virginia and only slightly better in Maryland.

With fewer crabs in the Bay, watermen now routinely catch far more than the 46 percent that scientists say is the upper limit to maintain a healthy population.

Observers say time is running out to reverse the damage.

“The Bay is now degraded to the point that its basic ability to withstand even low levels of pollution is in jeopardy,” said Naval Academy professor Howard Ernst, an expert on the restoration effort.

A 25-year, $6 billion cleanup effort by state governments and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has come under widespread criticism as it has repeatedly fallen short of its stated goals. Officials also overstated their success to keep funding in place.

The Chesapeake Bay Foundation, an environmental group, sued the EPA last month to force it to set a firm cap on pollutants. The group is heartened that new EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson has promised to make the Bay cleanup a priority.

“We certainly are hearing the right words,” said foundation president Will Baker. “But to be honest, we have heard those words for 30, 35 years and what we need to see is action.”

‘GRASS THAT’S PAINTED ON’

Headley has seen the changes up close. He’s pulled up traps filled with dead crabs, suffocated in oxygen-depleted water. He’s seen the state reduce the number of traps he’s allowed to drop in the water from 500 to 350.

And he’s seen mansions sprout along the shoreline, their lawns fertilized with the very chemicals that are choking the Bay. “Grass as green as you’ve ever seen in your life, looks like it’s painted on,” he says.

Easing his 46-foot (14 meter) Chesapeake Bay Deadrise back to the dock, Headley passes rusted shacks and crumbling chimneys, the ruins of once-thriving oyster and baitfish industries.

The crab fishery, too, is a shadow of its former self, employing 40 percent fewer jobs than it did a decade ago.

There are only a handful of crabbers working out of Reedville now, Headley says, but plenty of people are moving to town to enjoy the scenery.

Headley knows everybody on the water, but sometimes when he comes ashore he doesn’t recognize a soul. A way of life is dying. (Editing by Alan Elsner). Copyright the author or news agency. URL: http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSTRE52302020090304

Related Links:

• Our Oceans
• The Eight Steps that Help Kill More of Our Fish
• Oceans, Where Life Started, Are Dying – Part III
• Our Dead Zone Largest Ever This Year!

To & From New Zealand: Double Act of Eco-Terrorism

STOP flying to, or importing food from New Zealand because you are committing a double act of eco-terrorism!

If you are flying to New Zealand

If you are one of the 2.6 million tourists who fly to New Zealand each year to hike the deadly mountain paths, swim the toxic lakes, or watch whales and dolphins death throes, you are committing a double act of eco-terrorism:

1. You contribute to burning an estimated 3.2 billion gallons of fuel flying in and out of New Zealand. [Each liter of fuel produces about 2.4 kg of CO2 or 8.8 kg/U.S. gallon ~ 19.4 pounds/U.S. gallon.]

2. You destroy the marine ecosystems and harm the creatures you come in contact with.

New Zealand: A cesspool of Toxic Sludge. Photo Credit: NZ Greens [Note: No implied endorsement of NZ Greens is intended.]

If you are importing food from New Zealand

3. A 1kg (2.2lb) bag of New Zealand kiwifruit (in any of its cadmium, arsenic, lead, mercury… or organochlorine falvors), or any other food imported from New Zealand, produces about 12.3kg (~ 27.1lb) of CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent gases) pollution flying to the US, or 16.3kg (~ 36lb) of CO2e to Europe.

4. The pressure in New Zealand to produce food for export has turned the country into a giant sewage dump. “Hundreds of millions of tons of agricultural waste and farm runoffs are discharged into the lakes and coastal waters, and millions of tons of methane gas are released to the environment each year.” Extensive dead zones regularly appear off the coasts of New Zealand. Both  NZ and Australia are major sources of industrial agriculture as well as sheep and cattle factory farming. “New Zealand cattle and sheep also produce methane emissions equivalent to 33 million tons of carbon dioxide each year.”

An excerpt from: Truth About ‘100% Pure New Zealand’ Advertising Campaign

New Zealand is the size of Colorado yet it hosts up to 94 million farm animals (livestock excluding poultry), which discharge an estimated 300 million tons of effluent to the environment each year. New Zealand’s intensive animal industries produce about 4 times more manure than they could safely use as fertilizer. [The leftover is discharged or washed off into NZ coastal waters.]

We import food from New Zealand … even though it makes no sense from a planetary standpoint. —Physicist James E. Hansen

Related Links:

• Emergency Warning to Tourists Visiting New Zealand
• Stop New Zealand Committing Eco-Terrorism!
• Food Fetishism + Cheap Oil = Mounting Pollution

• Oceans, Where Life Started, Are Dying – Part III
• None Shall Sleep!

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World Oceans in Extreme Danger

Project Censored:
Top 25 Censored News Stories of 2007

Oceans of the World in Extreme Danger

Source: Mother Jones, March /April, 2006
Title: The Fate of the Ocean
Author: Julia Whitty

Oceanic problems once found on a local scale are now pandemic. Data from oceanography, marine biology, meteorology, fishery science, and glaciology reveal that the seas are changing in ominous ways. A vortex of cause and effect wrought by global environmental dilemmas is changing the ocean from a watery horizon with assorted regional troubles to a global system in alarming distress.

According to oceanographers the oceans are one, with currents linking the seas and regulating climate. Sea temperature and chemistry changes, along with contamination and reckless fishing practices, intertwine to imperil the world’s largest communal life source.

In 2005, researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory found clear evidence the ocean is quickly warming. They discovered that the top half-mile of the ocean has warmed dramatically in the past forty years as a result of human-induced greenhouse gases.

One manifestation of this warming is the melting of the Arctic. A shrinking ratio of ice to water has set off a feedback loop, accelerating the increase in water surfaces that promote further warming and melting. With polar waters growing fresher and tropical seas saltier, the cycle of evaporation and precipitation has quickened, further invigorating the greenhouse effect. The ocean’s currents are reacting to this freshening, causing a critical conveyor that carries warm upper waters into Europe’s northern latitudes to slow by one third since 1957, bolstering fears of a shut down and cataclysmic climate change. This accelerating cycle of cause and effect will be difficult, if not impossible, to reverse.

Atmospheric litter is also altering sea chemistry, as thousands of toxic compounds poison marine creatures and devastate propagation. The ocean has absorbed an estimated 118 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide since the onset of the Industrial Revolution, with 20 to 25 tons being added to the atmosphere daily. Increasing acidity from rising levels of CO2 is changing the ocean’s PH balance. Studies indicate that the shells and skeletons possessed by everything from reef-building corals to mollusks and plankton begin to dissolve within forty-eight hours of exposure to the acidity expected in the ocean by 2050. Coral reefs will almost certainly disappear and, even more worrisome, so will plankton. Phytoplankton absorb greenhouse gases, manufacture oxygen, and are the primary producers of the marine food web.

Mercury pollution enters the food web via coal and chemical industry waste, oxidizes in the atmosphere, and settles to the sea bottom. There it is consumed, delivering mercury to each subsequent link in the food chain, until predators such as tuna or whales carry levels of mercury as much as one million times that of the waters around them. The Gulf of Mexico has the highest mercury levels ever recorded, with an average of ten tons of mercury coming down the Mississippi River every year, and another ton added by offshore drilling.

Along with mercury, the Mississippi delivers nitrogen (often from fertilizers). Nitrogen stimulates plant and bacterial growth in the water that consume oxygen, creating a condition known as hypoxia, or dead zones. Dead zones occur wherever oceanic oxygen is depleted below the level necessary to sustain marine life. A sizable portion of the Gulf of Mexico has become a dead zone—the largest such area in the U.S. and the second largest on the planet, measuring nearly 8,000 square miles in 2001. It is no coincidence that almost all of the nearly 150 (and counting) dead zones on earth lay at the mouths of rivers. Nearly fifty fester off U.S. coasts. While most are caused by river-borne nitrogen, fossil fuel-burning plants help create this condition, as does phosphorous from human sewage and nitrogen emissions from auto exhaust.

Meanwhile, since its peak in 2000, the global wild fish harvest has begun a sharp decline despite progress in seagoing technologies and intensified fishing. So-called efficiencies in fishing have stimulated unprecedented decimation of sealife. Long-lining, in which a single boat sets line across sixty or more miles of ocean, each baited with up to 10,000 hooks, captures at least 25 percent unwanted catch. With an estimated 2 billion hooks set each year, as much as 88 billion pounds of life a year is thrown back to the ocean either dead or dying. Additionally, trawlers drag nets across every square inch of the continental shelves every two years. Fishing the sea floor like a bulldozer, they level an area 150 times larger than all forest clearcuts each year and destroy seafloor ecosystems. Aquaculture is no better, since three pounds of wild fish are caught to feed every pound of farmed salmon. A 2003 study out of Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia concluded, based on data dating from the 1950s, that in the wake of decades of such onslaught only 10 percent of all large fish (tuna, swordfish) and ground fish (cod, hake, flounder) are left anywhere in the ocean.

Other sea nurseries are also threatened. Fifteen percent of seagrass beds have disappeared in the last ten years, depriving juvenile fish, manatees, and sea turtles of critical habitats. Kelp beds are also dying at alarming rates.

While at no time in history has science taught more about how the earth’s life-support systems work, the maelstrom of human assault on the seas continues. If human failure in governance of the world’s largest public domain is not reversed quickly, the ocean will soon and surely reach a point of no return.

Comment:
After release of the Pew Oceans Commission report, U.S. media, most notably The Washington Post and National Public Radio in 2003 and 2004, covered several stories regarding impending threats to the ocean, recommendations for protection, and President Bush’s response. However, media treatment of the collective acceleration of ocean damage and cross-pollination of harm was left to Julia Whitty in her lengthy feature. In April of 2006, Time Magazine presented an in-depth article about earth at “the tipping point,” describing the planet as an overworked organism fighting the consequences of global climate change on shore and sea. In her Mother Jones article, Whitty presented a look at global illness by directly examining the ocean as earth’s circulatory, respiratory, and reproductive system.

Following up on “The Last Days of the Ocean,” Mother Jones has produced “Ocean Voyager,” an innovative web-based adventure that includes videos, audio interviews with key players, webcams, and links to informative web pages created by more than twenty organizations. The site is a tour of various ocean trouble spots around the world, which highlights solutions and suggests actions that can be taken to help make a difference.

UPDATE BY JULIA WHITTY
This story is awash with new developments. Scientists are currently publishing at an unprecedented rate their observations—not just predictions—on the rapid changes underway on our ocean planet. First and foremost, the year 2005 turned out to be the warmest year on record. This reinforces other data showing the earth has grown hotter in the past 400 years, and possibly in the past 2,000 years. A study out of the National Center for Atmospheric Research found ocean temperatures in the tropical North Atlantic in 2005 nearly two degrees Fahrenheit above normal; this turned out to be the predominant catalyst for the monstrous 2005 hurricane season—the most violent season ever seen.

The news from the polar ice is no better. A joint NASA/University of Kansas study in Science (02/06) reveals that Greenland’s glaciers are surging towards the sea and melting more than twice as fast as ten years ago. This further endangers the critical balance of the North Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, which holds our climate stable. Meanwhile, in March, the British Antarctic Survey announced their findings that the “global warming signature” of the Antarctic is three times larger than what we’re seeing elsewhere on Earth—the first proof of broadscale climate change across the southern continent.

Since “The Fate of the Ocean” went to press in Mother Jones magazine, evidence of the politicization of science in the global climate wars has also emerged. In January 2006 NASA’s top climate scientist, James Hansen, accused the agency of trying to censor his work. Four months later, Hansen’s accusations were echoed by scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, as well as by a U.S. Geological Survey scientist working at a NOAA lab, who claimed their work on global climate change was being censored by their departments, as part of a policy of intimidation by the anti-science Bush administration.

Problems for the ocean’s wildlife are escalating too. In 2005, biologists from the U.S. Minerals Management Service found polar bears drowned in the waters off Alaska, apparent victims of the disappearing ice. In 2006, U.S. Geological Survey Alaska Science Center researchers found polar bears killing and eating each other in areas where sea ice failed to form that year, leaving the bears bereft of food. In response, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources revised their Red List for polar bears—upgrading them from “conservation dependent” to “vulnerable.” In February, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced it would begin reviewing whether polar bears need protection under the Endangered Species Act.

Since my report, the leaders of two influential commissions—the Pew Oceans Commission and the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy—gave Congress, the Bush administration, and our nation’s governors a “D+” grade for not moving quickly enough to address their recommendations for restoring health to our nation’s oceans.

Most of these stories remain out of view, sunk with cement boots in the backwaters of scientific journals. The media remains unable to discern good science from bad, and gives equal credence to both, when they give any at all. The story of our declining ocean world, and our own future, develops beyond the ken of the public, who forge ahead without altering behavior or goals, and unimpeded by foresight.

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