Ocean Change

How human activity is altering the ocean, and the role of the ocean in climate change.

Key topics in this category:

RECENT POSTS

March 6, 2012 | 9:37 AM | By

Cape and Islands the last piece in statewide no discharge zone

Green Massachusetts

The green area represents waters around the Cape and Islands that state officials have nominated for a 'no discharge zone' designation. Yellow areas are already no discharge zones.

The Massachusetts Office of Energy and Environmental affairs has announced that it’s nominating the waters south of Cape Cod and around Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket a ‘no discharge zone’ – meaning that the thousands of commercial and recreational boats that crisscross Vineyard and Nantucket Sounds each year will have to store their sewage and get it pumped out when they reach shore, rather than dumping it directly into the water.

Green Massachusetts / Flickr

Areas marked in green are already no discharge zones. With the addition of the Cape and Islands zone, 95% of state waters would be no discharge zones.

The map at top shows the new no discharge zone. But the map that really grabbed my attention is this one, to the right:

The Cape and Islands zone is essentially the last piece to come together for the Patrick administration’s goal of establishing a statewide no discharge zone. Once this new zone is enacted, just 5% of state waters – an area further offshore from Boston – will be exempt from the rules. And, of course, there’s always that pesky area of federal waters in the middle of Nantucket Sound … not much the state can do about that.

You may also have noticed a couple of blue trapezoids in the proposed Cape and Islands no discharge zone. Those are temporary exemptions for the ferries that run between Falmouth and Martha’s Vineyard and from Hyannis to Nantucket. Once the Steamship Authority has completed pump-out facilities, those exemptions are supposed to go away.

Read more about the development from the Cape Cod Times.

FILED UNDER: Ocean Change
February 3, 2012 | 9:27 PM | By

A warming world? See for yourself

A few months back, I posted a slideshow of heat maps (in the most literal sense of the phrase) showing the change in 10-year average temperatures over the past 130 years. Well, NASA has taken that one step further, creating an animated 30-second video using annual average temperatures that dramatically demonstrates the accelerated warming we’ve experienced since about 1970.

If watching that a few times has got you thinking, and you’d like to see more of what climate change looks like … well, see for yourself.

FILED UNDER: Ocean Change, see for yourself
January 23, 2012 | 2:37 PM | By

Ocean acidification and the explosion of hockey sticks

flyzipper / flickr

You’ve heard about hockey sticks, right? No, not the actual wood and carbon-fiber things you use to push a puck around on the ice, although those are perfectly nice. What I’m referring to are graphs of the history of various climate factors that are shaped roughly like a hockey stick – a long, relatively flat line that suddenly takes a sharp upward turn around the turn of the 20th century.

The original hockey stick graph was one of global average temperatures over the past 1,000 years. The graph was popularized by Al Gore in his film An Inconvenient Truth, then demonized – along with one of its primary creators, Dr. Michael Mann – by the 2009 ClimateGate email affair. Since then, the hockey stick meme has stayed pretty dormant … until now.

Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Ocean Change, ocean acidification
January 13, 2012 | 11:46 AM | By

Washington state invokes Clean Water Act for ocean acidification

willapalens / flickr

Oysters - particularly babies - are exquisitely sensitive to ocean acidification.

In the fall of 2010, the EPA issued a memo stating for the record that the Clean Water Act covers ocean acidification, as well as more traditional types of pollution. While widely hailed as an historic call to action, the memo was full of qualifiers and caveats. First and foremost, few states would be expected to have the data necessary to request an “impaired” listing. Perhaps more daunting, such a listing would trigger legal requirements for corrective action – essentially an impossible standard to meet since nothing a state could do on its own would even touch the global phenomenon of ocean acidification.

So was this just political grandstanding destined to go nowhere? Maybe not.

In their latest report to EPA, the state of Washington has listed Puget Sound as “waters of concern” based on the impact of ocean acidification on the local shellfish industry. That’s a strategy that takes advantage of a work-around explicitly mentioned in the memo – demonstrating biological or ecological impacts attributable to ocean acidification, rather than documenting the subtle and slow-moving chemical phenomenon itself. It will be interesting to see whether other states follow suit; it could prove more difficult in areas with less pristine waters facing multiple impacts.

But back to the listing, itself. As explained in a press release from the Center for Biological Diversity, it’s kind of a half-way move:

In its new assessment, Washington again declined to identify coastal waters as “impaired” by acidification — a classification that would have required steps to curb carbon pollution causing acidification. Instead, only Puget Sound was put on the “waters of concern” list, a less urgent category.

This listing may not match the urgency that shellfish growers in the area feel, but it does at least give the problem some official standing.

FILED UNDER: Ocean Change, EPA, ocean acidification, oysters
January 12, 2012 | 11:24 AM | By

“Essentially all” baby harp seals dying for lack of ice

You’ll find no heart-wrenching photo of a fluffy white baby harp seal with big, pathetic brown eyes here. That’s not out of any journalistic integrity policy, but because I want to talk about words.

Compare these three statements regarding North Atlantic harp seals:

  1. “According to Canada’s Fisheries and Oceans department, as many as 80 percent of seal pups born in 2011 may have died because of a lack of sea ice.”
  2. “Climate change may have killed 4 out of 5 seal pups in 2011.”
  3. “Entire year classes may be disappearing from the population in low ice years. Essentially all of the pups die.”

All three describe the same study, recently published in the journal PLoS ONE. And, in fact, they all say approximately the same thing. What’s interesting to me is the different reactions elicited by the phrases “80 percent” (impressive, but dry), “4 out of 5″ (yikes!), and “essentially all” (!!!).

Actually, what’s really interesting is where I found these. The first came from a brief summary of the study published on Yale’s Environment 360 website – a highly reputable, straight-up-the-middle kind of outlet. The second came from Chris Mim’s post on Grist – a site where you might expect to find a bit more hype. But – and here’s the kicker – the last came directly from the scientist who did the study.

Lessons learned? Wording is important (duh). And it’s not always scientists who pull out the dry technical language.

FILED UNDER: Fish & Wildlife, Ocean Change
December 14, 2011 | 3:48 PM | By

Warming favors parasites who bend fish to their will

Those poor little fishies. It just goes from bad, to worse, to completely bizarre this week. Thanks to NY Times Green blog for calling my attention to this story:

It sounds almost like science fiction: A parasite manipulates a fish’s behavior to make it seek out warmer water, probably by altering its brain chemistry. In the warmer environment, the parasite’s growth — and its capacity to infect other hosts — kicks into overdrive.

In an eight-week study, tapeworms infecting three-spined sticklebacks grew four times (let me say that again: fourtimes) faster in 68ºF water than in 59ºF. To put that temperature difference in perspective, ocean temperatures around New England have risen 2-4ºF in the span of 40-ish years. We could easily see another 10ºF this century. That’s good news for the tapeworms, because larger worms are more successful at infecting birds (the next step in their life cycle) and produce more eggs once they’re in the birds’ guts.

University of Leicester

A three-spined stickleback and four parasites removed from its abdomen.

But back to the poor worm-eaten sticklebacks. They’re full of worms (those big white blobs in the photo all came out of that one little fish), they’re growth-stunted (not sure if that’s just from the heat, or if the parasites slow them down Lead author Iain Barber clarified: even uninfected fish grow slower at higher temps, suggesting they just don’t cope well with the heat), and they can’t reproduce. Not a recipe for success.

To add insult to injury, the parasites appear to modify the fishes’ behavior such that they actually prefer the warmer temperatures that are so detrimental to their health. In other words, while dozens of fish species are moving northward and offshore to avoid rising ocean temperatures, the authors of the study speculate that tapeworm-infected sticklebacks would be more likely to stay put or even seek out areas of extreme warming.

Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Ocean Change
December 13, 2011 | 2:25 PM | By

Coming soon: Christmas Bird Counts (and some southerly transplants)

Dr. Thomas T. Barnes / U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

Seen one of these guys recently? For you non-birders, it’s a purple finch. And, according to Earth Gauge, your chances of seeing one of them in southern New England this time of year are far better now than they were a few decades ago, thanks to climate change.

Warmer winter temperatures are allowing the Purple Finch to winter 433 miles farther north than it did in the 1960s.

Here’s what that looks like in graphic format:

And purple finches aren’t alone: Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Fish & Wildlife, Ocean Change, Christmas, winter
December 13, 2011 | 10:51 AM | By

Fish may be more susceptible to acid oceans than thought

Mark Kasianowicz / Massachusetts State House Photographer

Massachusetts' 'sacred cod' may be hanging by a string, thanks to a legacy of overfishing and a future made uncertain by climate change.

As if a new assessment questioning the health of Gulf of Maine cod stocks weren’t enough bad news for New England’s fishermen, Nature News this week reports on two new studies that suggest fish may be more susceptible to climate change – particularly impacts on ocean chemistry – than previously thought.

It’s been obvious for some time that cod and other commercially important marine species are feeling the heat, literally. Surface water temperatures around New England have risen 2-4ºF in the past fifty years. Likewise, half of the three dozen marine species monitored by federal fishery scientists have shifted their distributions to match changing water temperatures. Most are moving northward and offshore, but others – like mackerel – have actually moved into shallower, near-shore waters.

The other carbon dioxide problem

Human-produced carbon dioxide emissions do more than raise ocean temperatures. They actually alter the fundamental chemistry of the ocean in a myriad of ways (scary thought, huh?). It all starts with one chemical reaction: water plus carbon dioxide makes carbonic acid. Add enough carbon dioxide, and the pH of the ocean starts to drop. So far we’ve added enough to shift the average pH of the ocean from 8.2 to 8.1 – a deceptively small numeric change that actually reflects a 30% increase in acidity. Thus, the term ‘ocean acidification.’

Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Fish & Wildlife, Ocean Change, fisheries, ocean acidification
December 2, 2011 | 10:38 AM | By

Lost-and-found underwater robot highlights role – and risks – of ocean tech

These days, plastic trash and derelict fishing gear are nearly as common on beaches as sand. And around here, it’s not unusual to hear about sick or dead whales stranding on the beach. But finding an autonomous underwater vehicle – call it an underwater robot, if you like – is extremely rare, even with all the ocean engineers clustered along the coasts of Rhode Island and Massachusetts.

Still, that’s what happened. The New Bedford Standard-Times reports that New Bedford Port Security found a small autonomous underwater vehicle on Monday.

The 4-foot-long, battery-powered, torpedo-shaped device has a winged turret mounted on top for stability, a transparent midsection and sensors inside a strip on its underside.

There are still more questions than answers surrounding the discovery ..

Chief among those are who the vehicle belongs to. So far they’ve ruled out the most obvious possibilities – the military or military contractors, UMass Dartmouth’s School of Marine Science and Technology, and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. (If, by some wild chance, you are the proud owner of this little beastie or know who is, officials would love to hear from you.)

The Argo project aims to monitor ocean temperature, salinity, and movement on a global scale using thousands of autonomous floats that relay data to satellites on a regular basis. This graphic shows the whereabouts of more than 3,000 floats that have reported in over the past month.

Aside from being an intriguing mystery, I see this find as a reminder of the expanding role of robotics in ocean science. You might be surprised to learn just how many machines are bobbing and driving around in the ocean right now. Many, like the thousands of Argo floatsconstantly monitoring ocean temperature and salinity around the world, do their jobs – sometimes for years – without any human guidance. Others work more the Mars Rovers or a well-trained working dog, taking instructions from their human operators, then heading off to work independently for a while before returning to exchange the data they’ve gathered for a new set of instructions.
Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Ocean Change