Musicians send timely message to protect oceans

"Gotta say it now
Better loud than too late"

As part of an effort to raise awareness about ocean preservation, Pearl Jam has launched a new web page called “Oceans” which features the video “Amongst the Waves,” the group’s third single from Backspacer.

A note on the “Oceans” page reads, “There is only one Ocean for everyone and everything. It is a finite, precious resource under tremendous economic and environmental pressure. Look after it.”

Along with the video, Pearl Jam provides a list of 11 things that can be done to protect the planet’s oceans from encouraging renewable energy to contacting government officials to supporting local organic farming.

Currently “Amongst the Waves” is available for download from iTunes with proceeds from U.S. sales benefiting the Conservation International’s ocean campaign.

From Brendan DeMelle (Huffingtonpost)

In an other style, a new music video from Barcelona-based musician Sam Lardner spreads a timely message about the importance for all people to work together to save our oceans.

With footage of the BP Deepwater disaster in the Gulf of Mexico contrasted by majestic images of beaches and marine life from around the world, the video is an eye-opening look at the perils and pleasures found in the blue depths of our oceans, which cover 70 percent of the Earth's surface.

"Blue Planet" is the first video released from Sam Lardner's new "Oceans Are Talking" CD.

Featuring groups of children singing out for ocean protection from D.C. to Dominica, Spain to Australia, the video is a rallying call to all ages that the time to save our oceans is right now.

Sam Lardner told me today from Barcelona, "When we started working on this project, Ann Luskey from the Ocean Foundation and I were focused on how to enlighten and empower children, but halfway through the process, we realized this isn't a children's CD at all."

"The fact is, the oceans can't wait for our children to grow up and save them. There isn't time to wait for that. It's all of us, right now, who have to solve this. We all have to change," Lardner says.

The "Blue Planet" video is dedicated to the life work of Sylvia Earle and her TED-prize project, Mission Blue.

Links :

• DailyMail : Jackson Browne blames bottled water for the oil spill!
  

The impact of climate change on the world's marine ecosystems

From HuffingtonPost

The impacts of climate change on the world's oceans include decreased ocean productivity, altered food web dynamics, reduced abundances of habitat-forming species, shifting species distributions, and a greater incidence of disease. Further change will continue to create enormous challenges and costs for societies worldwide, particularly those in developing countries.

Those are the primary conclusions of a review article published in June in Science by John Bruno and his colleague, Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg Director of The University of Queensland's Global Change Institute.

The article was a comprehensive synthesis on the effects of climate change on the world's oceans. We concluded that man-made greenhouse gases are driving irreversible and dramatic changes to the way the ocean functions, with potentially dire impacts for hundreds of millions of people across the planet.

Professor Hoegh-Guldberg likes to point out that the ocean, which produces half of the oxygen we breathe and absorbs 30% of human-generated CO2, is equivalent to the planets heart and lungs:

Quite plainly, the Earth cannot do without its ocean. This study, however, shows worrying signs of ill health. We are entering a period in which the very ocean services upon which humanity depends are undergoing massive change and in some cases beginning to fail. Further degradation will continue to create enormous challenges and costs for societies worldwide.
The "fundamental and comprehensive" changes to marine life identified in the report include rapidly warming and acidifying oceans, changes in water circulation and expansion of dead zones within the ocean depths.

These are driving major changes in marine ecosystems: less abundant coral reefs, sea grasses and mangroves (important fish nurseries); fewer, smaller fish; a breakdown in food chains; changes in the distribution of marine life; and more frequent diseases and pests among marine organisms.

Additionally, the distribution and abundance of phytoplankton communities throughout the world, as well as their phenology and productivity, are changing in response to warming, acidifying, and stratifying oceans. The annual primary production of the world's oceans has decreased by at least 6% since the early 1980s, with nearly 70% of this decline occurring at higher latitudes and with large relative decreases occurring within Pacific and Indian ocean gyres. Overall, these changes in the primary production of the oceans have profound implications for the marine biosphere, carbon sinks, and biogeochemistry of Earth.

Among the most clear and profound influences of climate change on the world's oceans are its impacts on habitat-forming species such as corals, sea grass, mangroves, salt marsh grasses, and oysters. Collectively, these organisms form the habitat for thousands of other species. Although some resident species may not have absolute requirements for these habitats, many do, and they disappear if the habitat is removed. For example, mass coral bleaching and mortality, the result of increasing temperatures, is already reducing the richness and density of coral reef fishes and other organisms.

What strikes me the most about the recent science coming out on this topic, is the degree to which we are modifying fundamental physical and biological processes by warming the oceans. The warming doesn't just kill sensitive species, it modifies everything from enzyme kinetics, to plant photosynthesis and animal metabolism, to the developmental rate and dispersal of larval (baby) fish to changing the ways food webs and ecosystems function. And the big surprise, at least to me, is how quickly this is all happening. We are actually witnessing these changes before we predict or model them. This isn't theoretical; this is a huge, real-world problem. Moreover, we, not just our children, will be paying the price if we don't get a handle on this problem very soon.

Links :

• images from the study
• NASA : Climate change, how do we know?
• NewObserver : His mission: heal the oceans before it's too late
  

Image of the week : Indian Ocean’s internal waves photographed

An image showing internal and surface waves on the Indian Ocean near the Andaman islands has been published by NASA’s Earth Observatory website.

“When tides drag the ocean over a shallow barrier such as a ridge on the ocean floor, it creates waves in the lower, denser layer of water,” Earth Observatory explains.
“These waves, internal waves, can be tens of kilometers long and can last several hours.”

The steady crash of waves pounding the shore draws vacationers to beaches across the world when temperatures climb.
Driven by the wind and tides, these familiar waves ride across the top of the ocean.
But deeper waves also move through ocean waters, visible only from their influence on ocean currents.
These waves are internal waves, and they run through lowest layers of ocean water, never swelling the surface.

This image shows both internal waves and surface waves on the Indian Ocean near the Andaman Islands.
The active Barren Island Volcano, part of the Andaman Islands, is shown emitting puffs of steam on the left side of the image.
The Advanced Land Imager (ALI) on the Earth Observing 1 satellite acquired the image on March 6, 2007.
Sunlight reflecting off the water’s surface gives it a pale, silvery blue color.
The tiny wrinkles running roughly horizontally across the ocean are surface waves.
Internal waves paint long diagonal lines across the ocean on the right side of the image.

Internal waves happen because the ocean is layered.
Deep water is cold, dense, and salty, while shallower water is warmer, lighter, and fresher.
The differences in density and salinity cause the various layers of the ocean to behave like different fluids.
When tides drag the ocean over a shallow barrier such as a ridge on the ocean floor, it creates waves in the lower, denser layer of water.
These waves, internal waves, can be tens of kilometers long and can last several hours.

As internal waves move through the lower layer of the ocean, the lighter water above flows down the crests and sinks into the troughs.
This motion bunches surface water over the troughs and stretches it over the crests, creating alternating lines of calm water at the crests and rough water at the troughs.

It is the pattern of calm and rough water that makes the internal wave visible in satellite images.
Calm, smooth waters reflect more light directly back to the satellite, resulting in a bright, pale stripe along the length of the internal wave.
The rough waters in the trough scatter light in all directions, forming a dark line.

Links :

• NASA : internal waves, Sulu Sea
• NASA : internal waves in the Tsushima Strait
• NASA : internal waves in San Francisco bay
• NASA : internal waves, Strait of Gilbraltar (other)
  

How much plastic is in the ocean ?

From Michael Reilly (DiscoveryNews)

Stiv Wilson of the ocean conservation group 5 Gyres has made a first attempt to tally how much plastic is in the global ocean.

We've all heard about the Texas-sized "garbage patch" swirling in the North Pacific, and recently we've been warned that the Atlantic's got a plastic problem, too. Rather than distinct patches, the planet's interconnected watery parts are effectively a thin soup of plastic refuse, with perhaps larger concentrations of rubbish in five large rotating gyres of water like the Pacific's.

The more people look, the more grim the situation looks. But how can we get our heads around how big the problem really is? How much plastic is really in the ocean, and can we clean it up?

In a new post on 5gyres.org, Wilson takes what appears to be the first-ever stab at trying to figure it out.

The number he comes up with is staggering: he conservatively estimates there are 315 billion pounds of plastic in the oceans right now.

Now, Wilson will be the first to admit a lot of assumptions were made in order to arrive at that number, but most of them err on the side of caution. It's worth going through his thought process and calculations here.

To help visualize that massive heap of trash, Wilson divides by a "supertanker" -- that is, a giant ship that could theoretically sail through the seas, skimming out the plastic junk as it goes (much of which hovers down to 90 feet below the surface).

No such ship has been outfitted to skim plastic. But let's say it did, and it could hold 500 million pounds of plastic. You'd need 630 of them to do the job (143 billion kilograms), or about 17 percent of the planet's current fleet of oil tankers.

To make it a little more personal, every American produces about 600 pounds of garbage each year. The proportion of plastic varies from household to household, but overall about half of all waste is synthetic. Some of that probably ends up in landfill, or recycled (Wilson says only about 3 percent of virgin plastic gets recycled).

Either way, the pile of plastic you inadvertently dump into the ocean each year is probably more than you can lift.

The point of the calculations is this: cleaning up the plastics in the ocean ain't gonna happen. Well-intentioned programs designed to take the fight to the high seas, like Project Kaisei and the Environmental Cleanup Coalition, for example, are exercises in futility.

"I'm not trying to call them out," Wilson told Discovery News. "What I really fear is a barge full of plastic coming in under the Golden Gate bridge, the media taking pictures and people thinking 'oh good, we've solved that problem.'"

A real cleanup would be astronomically expensive, both in terms of dollars and equipment.

But hope is not lost. Wilson added that if we can ratchet down the amount of plastic we throw away, the gyres will naturally spin out much of the junk floating in them. Eventually it will wash ashore, where it can easily be removed.

"I really want to see people's efforts focused on beach cleanups," he said. "They're free, can be organized in a grassroots way, and they can make a massive difference. A hundred people on a beach picking up plastic for a weekend can clean up as much as a barge can hold."

Links :

• Kaisei project : a passion to clean-up the Pacific Ocean great garbage patch
• 5gyres
• Ocean gybe garbage studies
  
• Gyre cleanup
• Photographies by Chris Jordan of birds and sea animals enmeshed in plastic
• Scripps (video) : Inside the plastic vortex
  

The long-term fate of the oil spill in the Atlantic

From University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa

The possible spread of the oil spill from the Deepwater Horizon rig over the course of one year was studied in a series of computer simulations by a team of researchers from the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST) at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.

Eight million buoyant particles were released continuously from April 20 to September 17, 2010, at the location of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig.
The release occurred in ocean flow data from simulations conducted with the high-resolution Ocean General Circulation Model for the Earth Simulator (OFES).

“The paths of the particles were calculated in 8 typical OFES years over 360 days from the beginning of the spill,” says Fabian Schloesser, a PhD student from the Department of Oceanography in SOEST, who worked on these simulations with Axel Timmermann and Oliver Elison Timm from the International Pacific Research Center, also in SOEST.
“From these 8 typical years, 5 were selected to create an animation for which the calculated extent of the spill best matches current observational estimates.”

The dispersal of the particles does not capture such effects as oil coagulation, formation of tar balls, chemical and microbial degradation.
Computed surface concentrations relative to the actual spill may therefore be overestimated.
The animation, thus, is not a detailed, specific prediction, but rather a scenario that could help guide research and mitigation efforts.

The animation shows the calculated surface particle concentrations for grid boxes about 10-km-by-10-km in size into April 2011.
For an estimated flow of oil from the Deepwater Horizon of 50,000 barrels per day over a 150 day period, a concentration of e.g. 10 particles per grid box in the animation corresponds roughly to an oil volume of 2 cubic meters per 100 square kilometer.

The oil spreads initially in the Gulf of Mexico, then enters the Loop Current and the narrow Florida Current, and finally the Gulf Stream.
“After one year, about 20% of the particles initially released at the Deepwater Horizon location have been transported through the Straits of Florida and into the open Atlantic,” explains Timmermann.

This animation suggests that the coastlines near the Carolinas, Georgia, and Northern Florida could see the effects of the oil spill as early as October 2010.
The main branch of the subtropical gyre is likely to transport the oil film towards Europe, although strongly diluted.
The animation also shows that as the northeasterly winds intensify near Florida around October and November, the oil in the Atlantic moves closer to the eastern shores of the US, whereas it retreats from the western shores of Florida.

The narrow, deep Straits of Florida force the Florida Current into a narrow channel, creating a tight bottleneck for the spreading of oil into the Atlantic.
As the animation suggests, a filtering system in the narrowest spot of the Florida Current could mitigate the spreading of the oil film into the North Atlantic.

This research was supported by the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC), NASA and NOAA through their sponsorship of the International Pacific Research Center in the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.

Links :

• SOEST
• NASA image of the oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico (acquired July 4)