Global Ocean Temperature Anomalies, June 2014

"Global ocean temperatures have reportedly never been this warm, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)."

Sea Surface Temperature Anomaly 08 25 2014

Sea Surface Temperature Anomaly 08 25 2014.
The first large emission of methane came from the Beaufort Sea just North of Alaska. The Sea Surface temperature anomaly on the left in the Laptev Sea is concerning. Large amounts of methane hydrates are right below the brown area. The temperature anomaly continues to intensify. As you can see, the red in the Bering Strait is extending toward the East Siberian Sea, the Chukchi Sea and the Beaufort Sea. Large amounts of methane hydrates are found here as well. These areas are likely to become household words. - Harold H Hensel

2014 Climate Action Network Position Statement

Temperature Anomaly August 20, 2014

First of Its Kind Map Reveals Extent of Ocean Plastic

First of Its Kind Map Reveals Extent of Ocean Plastic

Climate Change and the Ocean

Overfishing and more: SEA THE TRUTH -- In 2048 The Oceans Will Be Empty!...

There are fewer fish in the sea than ever before

Image: Fishing infographic (c) Global Ocean Commission

Rich countries pay zombie fishing boats US$5 billion a year to plunder the seas

The industrial fleet that now drags the high seas for fish has a combined engine power 10 times stronger than it did in 1950. Its nets are so huge that they’re sometimes big enough to hold 12 jumbo jets. And it is largely thanks to this all-out assault on high-seas fishing stocks that two-thirds of those stocks are at the brink of collapse—or well past the edge.

Without the subsidies, most of these businesses would fail. So thoroughly have industrial fleets overfished the seas that they couldn’t afford the fuel to travel the ever-increasing distance needed to catch the same amount of fish if their governments didn’t lavish public funds upon them.

In economics, you’d call these zombies—unprofitable companies that would fail if governments didn’t prop them up. There are two big problems with zombies. First, they take resources that could go to support new, productive companies. And by subsidizing zombies, governments allow them to keep prices low, driving productive companies out of business.

If industrial fleets weren’t subsidized, they’d go out of business. Small-scale fisheries that don’t need enormous amounts of fuel to catch huge hauls of fish—i.e. the ones using sustainable fishing practices—would then in theory thrive. Many of these fishermen are in poor countries whose governments can’t afford to compete in the industrial looting.

But instead of discouraging this trend, rich countries are paying those vessels to overfish like there’s no tomorrow. Japan, China, the US, the EU and other countries pay $27 billion to subsidize these vessels, according to a report (pdf) by the Global Ocean Commission, an independent body of international leaders focused on ocean conservation policy.

Read the full story on Quartz at http://qz.com/225432/rich-countries-pay-zombie-fishing-boats-5-billion-a-year-to-plunder-the-seas/

Environmental Investigation Agency

Historic Ocean Climate Link Revealed

Research vessel JOIDES Resolution arriving Lisbon after the IODP Expedition 339

Historic Ocean Climate Link Revealed
14.06.2014

Scientists have discovered a relationship between climate change and ocean currents over the past six million years after analysing an area of the Atlantic near the Strait of Gibraltar, according to research published on Friday, 13 June in the journal Science.

An expedition of scientists, jointly led by Dr Javier Hernandez-Molina, from the Department of Earth Sciences at Royal Holloway, University of London, examined core samples from the seabed off the coast of Spain and Portugal which provided proof of shifts of climate change over millions of years.

The team also discovered new evidence of a deep-earth tectonic pulse in the region, as well as thick layers of sand within mountains of mud in a vast sheet, spreading out nearly 100km into the Atlantic from the Gibraltar gateway. The quantity of sand is far more than was expected and has been caused by the strength, speed and long duration of bottom currents flowing through the Strait of Gibraltar from the Mediterranean.

“The sediments we examined show various shifts of climate change over millions of years”, Dr Hernandez-Molina said. “In addition, our findings could herald a significant shift in future targets for oil and gas exploration in deep-water settings. The thickness, extent and properties of these sands make them an ideal target in places where they are buried deep enough to allow for the trapping of hydrocarbons. The sand is especially clean and well sorted and therefore very porous and permeable.”

The expedition, carrying an international team of 35 scientists from 14 countries, recovered 5km of core samples from an area along the Gulf of Cadiz and west of Portugal.

The research found that a powerful cascade of Mediterranean water spilling into the Atlantic was scouring the rocky seafloor, carving deep-sea channels and building up mountains of mud. This is due to Mediterranean water being saltier than the Atlantic and therefore denser, causing it to plunge downwards.

Dr Hernandez-Molina added: “We set out to understand how the Strait of Gibraltar acted first as a barrier and then a gateway over the past six million years. The fascinating results we came back with have hugely increased our understanding of the Mediterranean Outflow Water (MOW) that flows through the Gibraltar gateway and have led to some key discoveries about the relationship between climatic shifts, deep-water circulation and plate tectonic events over a huge timescale.”

Sediments cored along the southwestern Iberian margin during Integrated Ocean Drilling Program Expedition 339 provide constraints on Mediterranean Outflow Water (MOW) circulation patterns from the Pliocene epoch to the present day. After the Strait of Gibraltar opened (5.33 million years ago), a limited volume of MOW entered the Atlantic. Depositional hiatuses indicate erosion by bottom currents related to higher volumes of MOW circulating into the North Atlantic, beginning in the late Pliocene. The hiatuses coincide with regional tectonic events and changes in global thermohaline circulation (THC). This suggests that MOW influenced Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), THC, and climatic shifts by contributing a component of warm, saline water to northern latitudes while in turn being influenced by plate tectonics.

Onset of Mediterranean outflow into the North Atlantic by F. Javier Hernández-Molina, et al. published in Science 13 June 2014: Vol. 344 no. 6189 pp. 1244-1250 DOI: 10.1126/science.1251306
Read the abstract and get the paper here.
News release issued by Royal Holloway College via AlphaGalileo here.

Eye to Eye with Climate Change in the Ocean

Eye to Eye with Climate Change in the Ocean
Published on May 19, 2014
Dr. Kaufman describes the sweeping transformation in the world ocean, brought about by climate change and also by pollution and over-fishing. His examples are global: from the most remote coral atolls of the Pacific nation of Kiribati, to the threatened waterfronts and fisheries of Massachusetts.

Melting Arctic Opens New Passages for Invasive Species

Melting Arctic Opens New Passages for Invasive Species
Scientists Say Early Action Could Protect Coasts
May 28, 2014 newsdesk.si.edu

For the first time in roughly 2 million years, melting Arctic sea ice is connecting the north Pacific and north Atlantic oceans. The newly opened passages leave both coasts and Arctic waters vulnerable to a large wave of invasive species, biologists from the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center assert in a commentary published May 28 in Nature Climate Change.

Two new shipping routes have opened in the Arctic: the Northwest Passage through Canada, and the Northern Sea Route, a 3000-mile stretch along the coasts of Russia and Norway connecting the Barents and Bering seas. While new opportunities for tapping Arctic natural resources and interoceanic trade are high, commercial ships often inadvertently carry invasive species. Organisms from previous ports can cling to the undersides of their hulls or be pumped in the enormous tanks of ballast water inside their hulls. Now that climate change has given ships a new, shorter way to cross between oceans, the risks of new invasions are escalating.

“Trans-Arctic shipping is a game changer that will play out on a global scale,” said lead author Whitman Miller. “The economic draw of the Arctic is enormous. Whether it’s greater access to the region’s rich natural resource reserves or cheaper and faster inter-ocean commercial trade, Arctic shipping will reshape world markets. If unchecked, these activities will vastly alter the exchange of invasive species, especially across the Arctic, north Atlantic and north Pacific oceans.”

The first commercial voyage through the Northwest Passage—a carrier from British Columbia loaded with coal bound for Finland—occurred in September 2013. Meanwhile, traffic through the Northern Sea Route has been rising rapidly since 2009. The scientists project that at the current rate, it could continue to rise 20 percent every year for the next quarter century, and this does not take into account ships sailing to the Arctic itself.

For the past 100-plus years, shipping between oceans passed through the Panama or Suez Canals. Both contain warm, tropical water, likely to kill or severely weaken potential invaders from colder regions. In the Panama Canal, species on the hulls of ships also had to cope with a sharp change in salinity, from marine to completely fresh water. The Arctic passages contain only cold, marine water. As long as species are able to endure cold temperatures, their odds of surviving an Arctic voyage are good. That, combined with the shorter length of the voyages, means many more species are likely to remain alive throughout the journey.

Though the routes pose major risks to the north Atlantic and north Pacific coasts, the Arctic is also becoming an attractive destination. Tourism is growing, and it contains vast stores of natural resources. The Arctic holds an estimated 13 percent of the world’s untapped oil and 30 percent of its natural gas. Greenland’s supply of rare earth metals is estimated to be able to fill 20 to 25 percent of global demand for the near future. Until now the Arctic has been largely isolated from intensive shipping, shoreline development and human-induced invasions, but the scientists said that is likely to change drastically in the decades to come.

“The good news is that the Arctic ecosystem is still relatively intact and has had low exposure to invasions until now,” said coauthor Greg Ruiz. “This novel corridor is only just opening. Now is the time to advance effective management options that prevent a boom in invasions and minimize their ecological, economic and health impacts.”

A link to the abstract will be available here after publication. For a full copy of the paper, images or to speak with the authors, contact Kristen Minogue at minoguek@si.edu or 443-482-2325.

El Nino 2014: What are the Odds?

El Nino 2014: What are the Odds?
Published on May 7, 2014
Key Scientists discuss the signs of an impending Pacific El Nino event, and what it means.

Giant Pastel Oceanscapes and Icebergs Drawn by Zaria Formanby

Greenland #54 / 40″ x 60″ / Soft pastel on paper.

Exploring Climate Change through Art:

Giant Pastel Oceanscapes and Icebergs Drawn by Zaria Formanby 

Christopher Jobson, January 2, 2014

Tackling climate change or the documentation of extreme environments can be challenging endeavors for any artist, but for Brooklyn-based Zaria Forman it was simply an extension of a childhood spent traveling with her family to some of the Earth’s most remote locations. For her 2012 project Chasing the Light, Forman led an ambitious art expedition by sailing up the northwest coast of Greenland to retrace the 1869 journey of American painter William Bradford. Along the way she documented the changing arctic landscape which she would use for inspiration in several large soft pastel drawings seen here. Her nearly photorealistic works exquisitely capture the atmosphere and mood of a landscape in flux.


Greenland #56 / 40″ x 60″ / Soft pastel on paper.


Greenland #62 / 47″ x 70″ / Soft pastel on paper.


Greenland #50 / 40″ x 60″ / Soft pastel on paper.




Greenland #52 / 55″ x 60″ / Soft pastel on paper.


Greenland #63 / 50″ x 75″ / Soft pastel on paper.




Maldives #1 / 40″ x 60″ / Soft pastel on paper.

In late 2013, Forman traveled to the Maldives, the lowest-lying country in the world, and an area said to be most vulnerable to rising sea levels, where she completed another body of work focusing on the rising ocean tides. The resulting drawings create an alluring juxtaposition of beauty and menace. Similar journeys have taken the artist to locations around Israel, Nosara, and Svalbard.


Maldives #2 / 41″ x 60″ / Soft pastel on paper.


Maldives #3 / 30″ x 60″ / Soft pastel on paper.


Maldives #4 / 41″ x 60″ / Soft pastel on paper.


Maldives #5 / 45″ x 60″ / Soft pastel on paper.


Nosara #1 / 45″ x 60″ / Soft pastel on paper.

If you’d like to learn more about Forman’s work she currently has several original works available on Artsy and you can purchase prints over on ArtStar. The artist has an upcoming exhibition at Carla Massoni Gallery that opens in March, and if you have a good eye you can spot 10 of her drawings used on the sets of Netflix’s smash hit House of Cards. You can also follow her on Facebook. (via Gaks Designs)

Southern Hemisphere Climate Changes

Published on Jan 27, 2014
I explain how declining Arctic sea ice is causing Australia to bake and Antarctic sea ice to grow. Animations used are Southern Hemisphere temperature anomalies, temperatures, jet steams, sea surface temperature and precipitation.

Graphic: Where is global warming going?

The melting polar icecap is creating waves the size of houses

The melting polar icecap is creating waves the size of houses
By Gwynn Guilford, April 29, 2014

Compared with the monster seas of the Pacific, Arctic waters are a picture of calm—whipping up, at their most violent, into lake-like chop. Or, at least, they were. New research shows that something is whipping up waves that reach five meters (16.4 feet).

“That’s a big wave—that’s a house-sized wave. And that has never been observed before in the Arctic,” says Jim Thomson, a physicist at the University of Washington who led the study (paywall).

So why is it happening now? “As the ice retreats in the Arctic, which it is doing in a very remarkable way, we’re finding more and more waves,” says Thomson. “And we’re finding a very direct relationship between the height of the waves and the retreat of the ice.”

He’s talking about the sheet of ice that blankets the Arctic, which melts a bit in the summer and re-freezes throughout winter. Toward the end of the last century, the summer sun typically peeled it back at most 100 kilometers (62 miles) from the coast. Now the edge of the Arctic ice cover recedes thousands of kilometers.

Every summer, in other words, the planet gets a whole new ocean. And with a new ocean comes new waves, it turns out.

Wind is the major force creating waves. While it makes smaller waves locally, swells—those big, rolling waves that can rear up out of the sea in storms—come from much further away. That explains why, until recently, the Arctic had whitecaps, but no swells. But the polar icecap’s recent peel-back is opening up the huge spans of water needed to make waves big.

Take, for instance, the Beaufort Sea that skirts northern Alaska, which Thomson and his colleague Erick Rogers were researching. As late as April, that gap between the north pole and Alaska is completely blanketed in ice, and whereas it once retreated hundreds of kilometers each summer, now the ice disappears almost entirely. That’s why heavy winds in September 2012 kicked up these waves:


​

This is worrisome for a couple of reasons. First, there’s simply safety. The new Arctic waterway is exciting to commercial shipping companies, which see it offering a shorter trade route. China, for example, estimates that by 2020, up to $500 billion worth of its trade could transit through the new waterway.


New transit routes opening up for two major vessel types: current routes (left) vs. those possible in 2050 (right). Smith and Stephenson, PNAS, Early Edition

The tradeoff, as Thomson and Rogers’ research suggests, is that more open sea means bigger waves—and more risk of danger. Between 2009 and 2013, the annual average of ships lost or severely damaged (pdf, p.3) in Arctic waters rose to 45, up from the 2002-7 average of seven ships, according to Allianz. And if the Arctic starts looking more like the rest of the ocean, that could get worse; storms caused three-quarters of all shipping losses last year, reports Allianz.

More ominous still is that the emergence of big swells is very likely accelerating the disappearance of Arctic ice. Swells carry much more energy. The force they deliver when they slam into the icecap breaks off floes, hastening the retreat—and creating ever-bigger swells.

On top of that, the huge amounts of foam created by big waves flushes more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into the ocean, says Thomson. Though scientists aren’t clear how those gases get dissolved, that’s going to shake up Arctic chemistry in a way that is hard to anticipate.

World's coastal megacities sinking 10 times faster than rising water levels

Rapid urbanisation and associated impacts are leading to increased vulnerability to floods. (Getty Images photo)


World's coastal megacities sinking 10 times faster than rising water levels
James Vincent, The Independent Apr 29, 2014

LONDON: Scientists have issued a new warning to the world's coastal megacities that the threat from subsiding land is a more immediate problem than rising sea levels caused by global warming.

A new paper from the Deltares Research Institute in the Netherlands published earlier this month identified regions of the globe where the ground level is falling 10 times faster than water levels are rising — with human activity often to blame.

In Jakarta, Indonesia's largest city, the population has grown from around half a million in the 1930s to just under 10 million today, with heavily populated areas dropping by as much as six and a half feet as groundwater is pumped up from the Earth to drink.

The same practice led to Tokyo's ground level falling by two metres before new restrictions were introduced, and in Venice, this sort of extraction has only compounded the effects of natural subsidence caused by long-term geological processes.

"Land subsidence and sea level rise are both happening, and they are both contributing to the same problem — larger and longer floods, and bigger inundation depth of floods," Dr Gilles Erkens, who led the research from Deltares, told the BBC.

"The most rigorous solution and the best one is to stop pumping groundwater for drinking water, but then of course you need a new source of drinking water for these cities. But Tokyo did that and subsidence more or less stopped, and in Venice, too, they have done that."

Unfortunately, human-driven subsidence is having a great affect than natural processes, with rapid urbanization and its associated impacts leading to increased vulnerability to floods.

Dr Erkens and his team estimate that the financial cost of structural damage and maintenance amounts to around a billion dollars annually and that parts of many megacities - including Jakarta, Ho Chi Minh City, Bangkok and Dhaka - will sink below sea level unless action is taken.

In the case of Jakarta defences such as a 30-kilometre seawall have been erected to protect the city form flooding, but if this were to break, Deltares have predicted that within 48 hours the homes of nearly one million people would be flooded.

For other cities though, even this sort of defence is futile, as rising water levels will overrun them first instead.

The tiny island nation of Maldives (formed from a double chain of 26 atolls) sits just five feet above sea level. Worst-case projections of rising water levels suggest that some 350,000 islanders will have to completely abandon their home before the end of the century, leaving behind a 2,000 year old culture for good.

CLIMATE CHANGE ADAPTATION IN FIJI

CLOSE UP - CLIMATE CHANGE ADAPTATION IN FIJI 09/03/2014
Published on Mar 11, 2014
There's no doubt that the Pacific is facing the worst of changing climatic conditions.

From rising sea levels, salt water intrusions to coastal erosion- all these are clear indications that climate change is real as it gets.

Close Up profiles some communities and get up close with the relevant authorities to investigate just what climate change has done to our vulnerable communities.

Baby Lobsters Are Disappearing, And Warming Oceans May Be To Blame

In this June 2007 file photo, a scientist holds a juvenile lobster while doing research on Orr’s Island in Harpswell, Maine.

Baby Lobsters Are Disappearing, And Warming Oceans May Be To Blame
EMILY ATKIN, APRIL 24, 2014 thinkprogress.org

It might be time to put away the butter.

Lobsters may be tough to come by in the coming years, according to a Tuesday report from the Associated Press. That report cited a University of Maine study showing that the number of baby lobsters settling off the state’s coast has declined by more than half from their 2007 levels.

Eight years is the amount of time a baby lobster takes to mature to legal harvesting size, so the real dinner table impacts would not likely be felt for at least some time.

As for the cause of this decline, the AP interviewed scientists who cited rising ocean temperature as a distinct possibility, though it failed to make the connection of warming oceans to man-made climate change. Rick Wahle, a marine ecologist at the University, cited rising ocean surface temperatures of .26 degrees Celsius per year since 2004, a dramatic increase from the .026 degree Celsius average increase Wahle was seeing each year since 1982.

Other possibilities for the decline include pollution, atmospheric condition, changes in predation, and availability of food, the report said — still not mentioning any of these elements’ potential connection to human-caused climate change.

The connection is pretty simple. Oceans are extremely sensitive to climate change, more so than the actual atmosphere. Indeed, more than 90 percent of global warming goes into heating the oceans, while less than three percent goes into heating the atmosphere. A good illustration of those findings can be seen in this 2011 study from Dr. John A. Church, the co-convening lead author for the IPCC Third Assessment Report’s chapter on sea level rise. A chart from that study is shown to the right.

Because lobsters are cold-blooded, they have to use more energy to breathe when the water around them gets warm. Breathing places more stress on the lobster, and may make it more susceptible to pathogens, the International Business Times notes. Climate-driven warming in gulf of Maine waters may also increase the prevalence of “lobster shell disease,” an unsightly sickness which stresses the lobster often leading to death, according to a study from the New England Aquarium.

As of now, though, harvests of full-grown lobsters are at an all-time high — which, ironically, is also due to warming waters, Stenck told ThinkProgress back in August. But as the Gulf continues to warm, the results won’t be as fruitful.

“We’re getting closer and closer to that point where the temperature is just too stressful for them, their immune system is compromised and it’s all over,” he said.

In anticipation of a decline, scientists in Maine are now competing for a share of $11 million of NASA grant money in hopes of creating a real-time lobster distribution monitoring system. That system will use satellite data and observations from fishermen and researchers to create an online map showing where and when lobsters and other key marine species can be found, taking pressure off fishery managers that in the past had to rely on historical catch data to plan for the upcoming season.

Lobsters make up 80 percent of the value of Maine’s fisheries, supporting not only fishermen, but boat builders, mechanics, bait sellers and the local tourist industry. The economies of the northernmost counties in Maine are 90 percent dependent on lobstering.

Acid Oceans

Acid Oceans (video)
Newsnight film on the impact of CO2 on the Oceans.
A third of all man made emissions of CO2 dissolve into our oceans forming carbonic acid. As those emissions increase scientists predict dramtic changes to sea life.
In Papua New Guinea a unique phenomenon, whereby CO2 is naturally released into the sea through volcanic vents, is acting as nature’s warning. It gives scientists a clue to what could happen to our oceans in decades to come.