Warmed-up oceans reduce key food link

NF Reporter · 12-06-2006, 07:10 PM

AP - In a "sneak peak" revealing a grim side effect of future warmer seas, new NASA satellite data find that the vital base of the ocean food web shrinks when the world's seas get hotter.

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famous · 12-08-2006, 03:41 AM

More extreme weather, the depletion of seafood - there really is no telling the amount of scary side effects of global warming.

It would be nice to have a leader who doesn't think science is a hoax used to irritate religious people. Perhaps we will have one in 2008.

DeViAnThans3 · 12-09-2006, 05:48 AM

It's a fact the global warming has a lot of disadvantages. But we may not forget people do can adapt themselves! Many people always forget that ... but of course, its better no global warming

limainfinita · 12-09-2006, 12:47 PM

I live in Peru, our ocean and sea is cold, in our sea exist a kind of placton called ''fitoplacton'' this is the food for millions of sea species.

That is the reason because Peruvian sea in one of the most richest seas in the entire globe.

If water temperature change, that will origin a terrible consecuence

DeViAnThans3 · 12-10-2006, 02:05 AM

That terrible consequence will be everywhere on the world, íf global warming continues.
And probably it will, as stopping global warming would cost billions and billions ... if not more.

limainfinita · 12-10-2006, 10:58 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DeViAnThans3

That terrible consequence will be everywhere on the world, íf global warming continues.
And probably it will, as stopping global warming would cost billions and billions ... if not more.

some hipotetical facts:

Sea in peru is cold
Fitoplactons live in cold sea
Little fish eat fitoplacton
big fish eat little fish
Peruvian sea has a lot of Sea fauna

Warn Sea water
No fitoplacton
no little fish
no big fish
In sumary No Sea fauna

Consecuences: A lot of people wont have jobs, then this people dont have money to buy food. I could continue but is easy to know what is next

Lygeia · 12-10-2006, 09:50 PM

Eventually Eskimos will no longer live in igloos, and global warming will leave our children and childrens children, with the ravages of time. Global warming is something none of us can ignore.

waltky · 05-02-2008, 01:02 AM

possum wants to know if all the fishes die, how's Granny gonna make him tuna fish samiches?...

Study: Warming water means less oxygen for sea life
WASHINGTON — Low-oxygen zones where sea life is threatened or cannot survive are growing as the oceans are heated by global warming, a new study warns.

Quote:

Oxygen-depleted zones in the central and eastern equatorial Atlantic and equatorial Pacific oceans appear to have expanded over the last 50 years, researchers report in Friday's edition of the journal Science. Low-oxygen zones in the Gulf of Mexico and other areas also have been studied in recent years, raising concerns about the threat to sea life.

Continued expansion of these zones could have dramatic consequences for both sea life and coastal economies, said the team led by Lothar Stramma of the University of Kiel in Germany. The finding was not surprising, Stramma said, because computer climate models had predicted a decline in dissolved oxygen in the oceans under warmer conditions.

Warmer water simply cannot absorb as much oxygen as colder water, explained co-author Gregory C. Johnson of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle. There are complex biological and chemical interactions in these low-oxygen regions, Stramma commented, adding that this needs to be more closely studied.

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waltky · 08-14-2008, 09:54 PM

Droughts of life in the oceans...

Ocean 'dead zones' becoming global problem
August 14, 2008 -- Science journal reports more than 400 dead zones around the world; Dead zones have too little oxygen for life; "It has severe consequences for ecosystems," scientist says; Pollution-fed algae is the cause of most of the world's dead zones

Quote:

Like a chronic disease spreading through the body, "dead zones" with too little oxygen for life are expanding in the world's oceans. "We have to realize that hypoxia is not a local problem," said Robert J. Diaz of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science. "It is a global problem, and it has severe consequences for ecosystems."

"It's getting to be a problem of such a magnitude that it is starting to affect the resources that we pull out of the sea to feed ourselves," he added. Diaz and co-author Rutger Rosenberg report in Friday's edition of the journal Science that there are now more than 400 dead zones around the world, double what the United Nations reported just two years ago. "If we screw up the energy flow within our systems, we could end up with no crabs, no shrimp, no fish. That is where these dead zones are heading unless we stop their growth," Diaz said.

He said the newest dead areas are being found in the Southern Hemisphere: South America, Africa, parts of Asia. Some of the increase is because of the discovery of low-oxygen areas that may have existed for years and are just being found, he said, but others are actually new. Pollution-fed algae, which deprive other living marine life of oxygen, are the cause of most of the world's dead zones. Scientists mainly blame fertilizer and other farm runoff, sewage and fossil-fuel burning. Diaz and Rosenberg, of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, conclude that it would be unrealistic to try to go back to pre-industrial levels of runoff. "Farmers aren't doing this on purpose," Diaz said. "The farmers would certainly prefer to have their [fertilizer] on the land rather than floating down the river."

More Ocean 'dead zones' becoming global problem - CNN.com

waltky · 08-23-2008, 02:22 AM

Scientists Concerned About Impact of Acid Levels on Sea Life Worldwide...

Acid on the Rise Under the Sea
Aug. 22, 2008 - Corrosive Oceans: Carbon Emissions Threaten Ecosystem

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Under the vast, trackless surface of the ocean, scientists have discovered a monster of a problem, literally rising from the deep. The world's oceans are becoming more acidic and corrosive because of the same carbon emissions that cause another immense problem: global warming. "We think this can have devastating impacts on our ocean ecosystem," said Richard Feely, program manager at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory. Cold water naturally absorbs carbon dioxide from the air, and the oceans have absorbed about half of the carbon emissions we've spewed out in the last two centuries -- hundreds of billions of tons of it.

Scientists first thought that was a good thing, since all that carbon sinking into the ocean meant it wouldn't be causing even more global warming in the air. But Feely says that "the ocean ecosystem can no longer handle all this excess Co2." The problem? Excess carbon dioxide turns seawater into carbonic acid. Scientists report the ocean's new acidity worldwide is crippling sea creatures in their efforts to form their shells and skeletons, to breathe, to move and catch prey, and to reproduce and mature.

Scientists have been slow to identify the problem, partly because it's invisible. Life in the ocean is mostly out of sight and out of mind, down there under that vast gray surface. Also invisible is all the carbon dioxide and its absorption into the ocean surface. But now scientists are beginning to see it all. Huge amounts of fossil fuels have been burned since the industrial age began, and those carbon emissions have already increased the ocean's acidification by 30 percent. This summer scientists were stunned to find acidic waters -- normally trapped in the deeper parts of the ocean -- rising up to shallow waters just off shore on the continental shelf, where so much sea life is found.

More ABC News: Corrosive Oceans: Carbon Emissions Threaten Ecosystem