Oceans on the Brink

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Jenny Panlilio discuss how the health of the oceans affect our own health.

Many algae species can accumulate and form blooms, some of which produce toxins that can cause severe respiratory problems if we inhale them ― and gastrointestinal and even neurological problems if we eat seafood or drink water contaminated with them.

As climate change causes waters to warm and agricultural runoff and pollution cause nutrient levels to increase, humans create conditions for some blooms to become enormous.

And James Bradley examines how marine life is on the verge of collapse.

It is not really a surprise that we find it difficult to assimilate this sort of information. Our ability to conceptualise fundamental changes to the world we inhabit is extremely limited, as is our capacity to think meaningfully about problems that are years or even decades away. To exist in a moment in which geological time and human time are collapsing into each other is to be brought up against the bounds of our imaginations.

This problem is amplified when it comes to the ocean: although we may know one part of the coastline intimately, the ocean’s immensity means that for most of us the rest of the ocean remains essentially unknown, a trackless non-place.

Update (July 11, 2019):  In an article published at PNAS, Daniel Rothman models the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the oceans.

[T]he unusually strong but geologically brief duration of modern anthropogenic oceanic carbon dioxide uptake is roughly equivalent, in terms of its potential to excite a major disruption, to relatively weak but longer-lived perturbations associated with massive volcanism in the geologic past. 

Rothman explains:

It’s a positive feedback. More carbon dioxide leads to more carbon dioxide. The question from a mathematical point of view is, is such a feedback enough to render the system unstable?

Instability seems to come from passing a certain threshold. In the geological record, such instability is associated with mass extinctions.