Marine Scientists Report Massive "Dead Zones"

[Barrett808]

Marine Scientists Report Massive "Dead Zones"
Marine Scientists Report Massive "Dead Zones"
by Stephen Leahy

Rising tides of untreated sewage and plastic debris are seriously threatening marine life and habitat around the globe, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) warned in a report Wednesday. The number of ocean "dead zones" has grown from 150 in 2004 to about 200 today, said Nick Nuttall, a UNEP spokesperson.

"These are becoming more common in developing countries," Nuttall told IPS from Nairobi, Kenya.

Dead zones can encompass areas of ocean 100,000 square kms in size where little can live because there is no oxygen left in the water. Nitrogen pollution, mainly from farm fertilisers and sewage, produces blooms of algae that absorb all of the oxygen in the water.

Growing global populations, mainly concentrated along coastlines, and the resulting increase in untreated sewage are endangering human health and wildlife, as well as livelihoods from fisheries to tourism, according to the "State of the Marine Environment" report.

"An estimated 80 percent of marine pollution originates from the land," said Achim Steiner, United Nations undersecretary-general and UNEP's executive director. "And this could rise significantly by 2050 if, as expected, coastal populations double in just over 40 years time and action to combat pollution is not accelerated," Steiner said in a statement.

(more)

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/1006-04.htm

[elehhhhna]

1. The amount of plastic crap that litters the eastern shore of Aruba

would SHOCK a person into silence.

[Opusnone]

2. Time is ripe for an entrepreneurial "Shit To Fuel" baron

to take over all the world's waste and turn it into usable, clean energy.

Ah, the future...

[suziedemocrat]

5. Hey don't laugh - TCP can turn shit into fuel (plastics too)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization

The process has a number of naysayers on this forum, but it looks promising to me.

[KittyWampus]

18. Thermal Depolymerization works quite well, though it must process local

waste and then dispense resulting fuel locally.

Like you bring this weeks garbage to the processing plant and fill up your tank with last weeks garbage while you are there.

[mopinko]

23. ready with a few dollars for her.

i gotta think it will be a baroness, but that's me.
but just imagine that this person has a nickle and dime startup investment fund. there are so many people out there who would put part of their meager retirement savings into this, figuring either it is going to pay off, or they will have been shucked of a dying plant anyway.
i am ready.

[Robbien]

3. I just wish this story got the kind of coverage the Foley story did

You would never see the NYT or WaPo go after it. The Louisiana Gulf coast use to supply most of all the fish sold in the US. Now due to the Gulf being full of dead zones, the US gets most of its fish supplies from Canada and Thailand.

[Overseas]

4. sad that we don't have to recycle if we think it too much of a hassle...

These dead zones are problems in addition to the heating of the ocean from air pollution.

[suziedemocrat]

6. and yet "they" tell us to beware the falling birth rate in the West. n/t

[msongs]

7. birth control pills and condoms for ALL heterosexuals :-) nt

[TX-RAT]

8. Exactly where were these dead zones?

[ConcernedCanuk]

9. I think they were in the WH decision maker's brains - still are . .

.
.
.

[Dead_Parrot]

12. Here's a partial map from a 2003 survey

from http://www.unep.org/geo/yearbook/yb2003/089.htm

[lonestarnot]

10. This just makes me want to scream!

But how do we stop it?

[PaulaFarrell]

15. Eat organic

It won't help with the sewage but the biggest contributor is agricultural to algae growth is fertilizer runoff

[lostnotforgotten]

16. Population Control - Give Mother Nature Time To Heal

eom

[Dem2theMax]

11. I watch a lot of NASA TV. I love it when they have live pictures

of the Earth, spinning around in all of her glory.
I sit and think "how could anyone look at this wonder of life and not want to take care of every inch of it?"

This article breaks my heart. :cry:

[Divine Discontent]

13. I truly thank that's wonderful

I know, for me, I see nature and personally thank God for this great Earth that we take such crappy care of as a species. I see those oxygen depletion zones scattered all around Florida and think, what have they done????

[SoCalDem]

14. Globalization in action

We are drowning in plastic trash..

and countries that used to reuse/repair/recycle everything they had, are now climbing onto the plastic bandwagon with us :(

China can make plastic crap so cheaply, and ship it everywhere..and of course it all ends up in the ocean :(

[lonestarnot]

17. The United States in INACTION! Distracted by the war of lies!

Indulging in slave labor, perverted sex, thieving, lying and cheating. Too busy to worry about the oceans. :grr:

[Barrett808]

19. Permian-Triassic extinction: mass ocean-wide bloom of H2S bacteria?

Here's a terrifyingly plausible theory about what's happening:

Impact from the Deep
Strangling heat and gases emanating from the earth and sea, not asteroids, most likely caused several ancient mass extinctions. Could the same killer-greenhouse conditions build once again?
By Peter D. Ward

Philosopher and historian Thomas S. Kuhn has suggested that scientific disciplines act a lot like living organisms: instead of evolving slowly but continuously, they enjoy long stretches of stability punctuated by infrequent revolutions with the appearance of a new species--or in the case of science, a new theory. This description is particularly apt for my own area of study, the causes and consequences of mass extinctions--those periodic biological upheavals when a large proportion of the planet's living creatures died off and afterward nothing was ever the same again.

Since first recognizing these historical mass extinctions more than two centuries ago, paleontologists believed them to have been gradual events, caused by some combination of climate change and biological forces such as predation, competition and disease. But in 1980 the understanding of mass extinctions underwent a Kuhnian revolution when a team at the University of California, Berkeley, led by geologist Walter Alvarez proposed that the famous dinosaur-killing extinction 65 million years ago occurred swiftly, in the ecosystem catastrophe that followed an asteroid collision. Over the ensuing two decades, the idea that a bolide from space could smite a significant segment of life on the earth was widely embraced--and many researchers eventually came to believe that cosmic detritus probably caused at least three more of the five largest mass extinctions. Public acceptance of the notion crystallized with Hollywood blockbusters such as Deep Impact and Armageddon.

Now still another transformation in our thinking about life's punctuated past is brewing. New geochemical evidence is coming from the bands of stratified rock that delineate mass extinction events in the geologic record, including the exciting discovery of chemical residues, called organic biomarkers, produced by tiny life-forms that typically do not leave fossils. Together these data make it clear that cataclysmic impact as a cause of mass extinction was the exception, not the rule. In most cases, the earth itself appears to have become life's worst enemy in a previously unimagined way. And current human activities may be putting the biosphere at risk once again.

...

But the biomarkers in the oceanic sediments from the latest part of the Permian, and from the latest Triassic rocks as well, yielded chemical evidence of an ocean-wide bloom of the H2S-consuming bacteria. Because these microbes can live only in an oxygen-free environment but need sunlight for their photosynthesis, their presence in strata representing shallow marine settings is itself a marker indicating that even the surface of the oceans at the end of the Permian was without oxygen but was enriched in H2S.

(more)

http://sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colID=1&articleID=00037A5D-A938-150E-A93883414B7F0000

[ldf]

21. long stretches of stability

punctuated by infrequent revolutions.

sort of like "catastrophic gradualism".

it seems to work on many levels and many fronts.

[Barrett808]

22. I also think Muller's Nemesis theory is still very attractive:

The "Nemesis Theory" was an outgrowth of the discovery of Alvarez et al., that the impact of a large (>10 km diameter) comet or asteroid was responsible for the great mass extinction that took place 65 million years ago.

Studies of the fossil record by Dave Raup and Jack Sepkoski shows that this was not an isolated event, but one of several mass extinctions that appear to occur on a regular 26 million year cycle. Their original paper analyzed marine fossil families, and was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA, vol 81, pages 801-805 (1984).

The original extinction data of Raup and Sepkoski are replotted in the following figure.



The vertical axis shows the "extinction rate." This was taken from the values given by Raup and Sepkoski for the percent family extinctions at each geologic boundary. In order to take into account the uncertainty in the boundary ages, each data point was plotted as a Gaussian, with width equal to the uncertainty, and area equal to the extinction rate. This plot thus represents a statistical estimate of the extinction rate vs. time. The individual Gaussians for each stage boundary are shown as dotted lines. The extinction 65 million years ago is indicated with the little dinosaur icon.

The peak near 11 Ma is real, but exaggerated by the requirement that the plot go to zero at the present. Arrows are plotted every 26 million years. Note that many of these are close to the peaks in the extinction rate. This is the apparent 26 million year periodicity discovered by Raup and Sepkoski.

(more)

http://muller.lbl.gov/pages/lbl-nem.htm

[Barrett808]

20. LA Times: Altered Oceans

A five-part series on the crisis in the seas
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/oceans/la-oceans-series,0,7842752.special