The Finite Sea, Humanity's Reckoning with a Changing Ocean

“ Historically, man has assumed that the land, water, and air around him would absorb his waste products. The ocean, the atmosphere, and even the earth were viewed as receptacles of infinite capacity. It is clear now that man may be exceeding nature's capacity to assimilate his wastes.
Most pollutants eventually decompose and diffuse throughout the environment. When organic substances are discarded, they are attacked by bacteria and decompose through oxidation. They simply rot. ”

“ The oceans also provide the ultimate sink for the by-products of human activities. Huge, closed septic tanks, they receive wastes from cities, farms, and industries via sewage outfalls, dumping from barges and ships, coastal run-off, river discharge, and even atmospheric transport. In the last decades, the growth of the world economy, the burgeoning demand for food and fuel, and accumulating discharges of wastes have begun to press against the bountiful limits of the oceans. ”

“ For most of human history, open access to the oceans and air was appropriate because the world’s population was too small and its technologies too limited to deplete stocks of fish, degrade air quality, or affect the climate.
But population growth and advances in technology have changed the way people use natural resources and made them vulnerable to overuse, depletion, and degradation. ”

“ We are only beginning to understand the depths of the ocean's mysteries, but we are quickly learning one crucial lesson: the ocean's resources are limited, and we must work together to preserve them. Many areas are already overfished; decades of pollution, including industrial waste, sewage, and toxic runoff, has taken its toll on the health of the ocean and its living creatures. Many species of fish are threatened with extinction, and even our precious coral reefs, once a safe haven for an amazing variety of animal and plant life, have suffered greatly. ”

“ It is only in the last hundred years (a little longer in Western Europe) that the scale of human activity, the pressure of human numbers and the propensity to manufacture unnatural substances (that the Ecosystem cannot absorb without being poisoned) have made mankind a threat to the viability of the Biosphere. And only in the last thirty years have obvious manifestations of Ecosystem collapse become evident. ”

“ The oceans are marked by a fundamental unity from which there is no escape. Interconnected cycles of energy, climate, marine living resources, and human activities move through coastal waters, regional seas, and the closed oceans. The effects of urban, industrial, and agricultural growth are contained within no nation's Exclusive Economic Zone; they pass through currents of water and air from nation to nation, and through complex food chains from species to species, distributing the burdens of development, if not the benefits, to both rich and poor. ”

“ Direct pollution such as offshore and on-shore spillage, gas flaring and abandoned installations. Alteration of the environment by activities such as the construction of access slots, pipelines, flowlines, roads, drilling sites and wellheads. Pollution and alteration of the environment by other primary and by secondary and tertiary industries encouraged by the oil industry. More insidious costs include the build up of heavy metals in ground-water, changes in soil acidity caused by atmospheric pollution and disruption to local communities and their relationship with their natural resources. ”

“ Common Resources: Addressing a Market Failure The Earth’s atmosphere is a global, open-access resource that no one owns, that everyone depends on, and that absorbs emissions from an enormous variety of natural and human activities. As such, it is vulnerable to overuse, and the climate is vulnerable to degradation—a problem known as the tragedy of the commons. The atmosphere’s global nature makes it very difficult for communities and nations to agree on and enforce individual rights to and responsibilities for its use. ”

“ Although the sea, by absorbing carbonic acid, acts as a regulator of huge capacity, which takes up about five-sixths of the produced carbonic acid, we yet recognize that the slight percentage of carbonic acid in the atmosphere may by the advances of industry be changed to a noticeable degree in the course of a few centuries. That would imply that there is no real stability in the percentage of carbon dioxide in the air, which is probably subject to considerable fluctuations in the course of time. ”

“ The idea, he says, hinges on the action of the ocean as a reservoir of carbon dioxide, and on the losses of the organic cycle under the influence of cold. Cold water absorbs more carbon dioxide than warm water. As the atmosphere becomes impoverished and the temperature declines, the capacity of the ocean to take up carbonic acid in solution increases. Instead, therefore, of re-supplying the atmosphere in the stress of its impoverishment, the ocean withholds its carbon dioxide to a certain extent, and possibly even turns robber itself by greater absorption. ”

“ Because of the absence of sunshine the chemical activities of the plant are altered at night and the absorption of carbon dioxide ceases; therefore over the land the maximum amount occurs during the nighttime. This gas is dissolved in sea water and given off with a rise in temperature, which causes the maximum amount over oceans to occur at midday.
Carbon dioxide is 1.50 times as dense as an equal volume of atmospheric air. Its greater density causes it to collect in mines, sewers, cellars, and other low places, unless there is forceful ventilation. ”

“ The flows maintain a rough equilibrium among the reservoirs, which all gradually adjust to other influences—and to influxes of carbon—over periods of decades to centuries. Other greenhouse gases, such as nitrous oxide, are part of similarly complex cycles.
In the absence of human activity, other, even larger reservoirs of carbon adjust only over thousands to millions of years. They include fossil deposits of coal, oil, and natural gas, which hold 10 to 20 times as much carbon as the atmosphere; deposits of methane hydrate in the ocean floors, which contain perhaps 12 times as much carbon ”

“ The Earth's present atmosphere consists of nitrogen and oxygen in addition to relatively small amounts of other gases; most of the oxygen is of biological origin. Some of the atmospheric gases, in spite of their low amounts, are crucial for life. The ultraviolet-absorbing ozone in the upper atmosphere and carbon dioxide are examples of such gases.
Significant in the search for extraterrestrial life are the data (e.g., planet's temperature) transmitted by Mariner II, which was launched from Cape Canaveral on August 27, 1962, and flew past Venus on December 14, 1962. ”

“ Bacteria, archea, and microeukaryotes dominate Earth's habitats, compound recycling, nutrient sequestration, and, according to some estimates, biomass. Microbes are not only ubiquitous, they are essential to all life, as they are the primary source for nutrients, and the primary recyclers of dead matter back to available organic form. Along with all other animals and plants, the human condition is profoundly affected by microbes, from the scourges of human, farm animal, and crop pandemics, to the benefits in agriculture, food industry, and medicine to name a few. ”

“ Zooplankton, mostly copepods, collected with automatic underwater sampling equipment on board the nuclear submarine Seadragon while cruising under the Arctic ice.
Other plankton research at Woods Hole uses radioactive carbon-14 and phosphorus-32 as tracers to evaluate rates of growth and nutrient assimilation by algae (floating green plants) . These investigations have revealed that the presence or absence of minute quantities of nutrient minerals in seawater affects the rate at which the algae produce oxygen by the process of photosynthesis. ”

“ This positive feedback is left out of more basic climate models, which lack the formal structure to account for such nuanced behavior.
Perhaps the most significant set of positive feedback mechanisms associated with the long-term behavior of the global climate are those that influence the capacity of the oceans to act as a carbon sink. [31] The planetary oceans are the largest carbon sinks and reservoirs in the global climate system, containing 93% of the planet’s exchangeable [32] carbon. ”

“ Given the its central role in the global carbon cycle, any feedback mechanism that negatively impacts the ocean’s ability to act as a carbon sink is likely to make an appreciable difference to the future of the climate in general. ”

“ A body of scientific research indicates that the current rate of increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is the highest in perhaps as long as 66 million years, sea levels are rising faster than in the past 2,700 years, and the oceans are acidifying more rapidly than in the past 56 million years. ”

“ Fourth Assessment Report showed that global anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gasses have increased 70% between 1970 and 2004, and anthropogenic emissions are very likely the cause of global climate change. ”

“ The issue of climate change is one that we ignore at our own peril. There may still be disputes about exactly how much we’re contributing to the warming of the earth’s atmosphere and how much is naturally occurring, but what we can be scientifically certain of is that our continued use of fossil fuels is pushing us to a point of no return. ”

“ Clusters or rapid sequences of relatively modest weather events may cause more damage than very powerful single events. Global climatological stresses—such as sea-level rise, ocean acidification, permafrost and glacial melt, air quality degradation, changes in cloud cover, and sustained shifts in temperature and precipitation—could substantially alter broader natural and manmade systems involving where and how humans live and patterns of infectious disease outbreaks, as well as critical ecosystems. ”

“ Seawater acidification may also be a threat to Mediterranean marine biodiversity [344] . The most obvious consequence of the increased concentration of CO2 in seawater is a reduced rate of biogenic calcification in marine organisms [345] , [346] . This could affect both planktonic and benthic communities. Calcifying phytoplankton (coccolithophores) play a significant role in the primary productivity of the oligotrophic Mediterranean Sea, whereas many benthic habitats are engineered by sessile organisms that lay down carbonate crusts. ”

“ Understanding the high capacity of nematodes to thrive in anoxic and/or sulphidic conditions may open a window to understand life in even more extreme conditions in past and future. The threat of large scale anoxia and ocean acidification through global warming urge the needs for identification of adaptational processes through micro-evolution and speciation on a relatively short time scale, for which vents and seeps can act as natural experiments. ”

“ These studies have generally concluded that global warming, by reducing global latitudinal wind stress, will lead to more highly stratified, oligotrophic oceans, reduced abundances of diatoms, and possibly reduce the effectiveness of the ocean carbon pump. Studies of extinction risk in marine biota by contrast have concentrated on benthos or nekton: there are essentially no studies of marine plankton extinction risk. ”

“ Small trends in soil carbon releases have been already observed. Increasing release of methane from ocean methane hydrates: This is a particularly potent long-term risk due to hydrate deposits through changes in ocean water temperature; the likely timescale for the physical processes involved spans centuries, however, and there is low risk this century. Rapid state changes in ecosystems, species range shifts, and species boundary changes: Research shows that climate change is an important component of abrupt ecosystem state-changes, with a prominent example being the Sahel region of Africa. ”

“ Beyond the sorts of gradual changes we have already experienced, global warming raises additional threats of large-scale changes, either changes to the global climate system, such as the disappearance of late-summer Arctic sea ice and the melting of large glacial ice sheets, or ecosystem impacts of climate change, such as critical endangerment or extinction of a large number of species. ”

“ Sea levels may rise during the first half of the next century enough to radically change the boundaries between coastal nations and to change the shapes and strategic importance of international waterways eftects both likely to increase international tensions. The climatic and sea-level changes &re also likely to disrupt the breeding grounds of economically important fish species. Slowing, or adapting to, global warming is becoming an essential task to reduce the risks of conflict. ”

“ As we shall see, policies designed to deal with complex systems buck this trend of convergence on a single model, and thus require a novel approach to policy decision-making.
If there is any consensus at all in climate science, it is this: the window for possibly efficacious human intervention is rapidly shrinking, and if we don’t make significant (and effective) policy changes within the next few years, anthropogenic influence on the climate system will take us into uncharted waters, where the best case scenario—complete uncertainty about what might happen—is still rather unsettling. ”

“ To enhance local, national, regional and global cooperation to address the causes of ocean acidification and to further study and minimize its impacts, including through information-sharing, regional workshops, the integration of scientists from small island developing States into international research teams, steps to make marine ecosystems more resilient to the impacts of ocean acidification and the possible development of a strategy for all small island developing States on ocean acidification ”