How To Protect The Ocean
SUFB 056: Warming Oceans Can Cause Dead Zones
Researchers have found that warming oceans after the last glacial period caused massive dead zones in the Pacific Ocean. The Warming Oceans were similar to the temperatures currently in the North Pacific caused by a warming body of water dubbed the "Blob."
Listen to the podcast to find out more and what you can do to stop it.
Shop for the Ocean:
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10 Ocean Tips to Conserve the Ocean:
http://www.speakupforblue.com/wordpress/sufb_optinpdf
Show Notes:
http://www.speakupforblue.com/session56
Welcome to the Speak Up For Blue Podcast session 56. Ocean warming may lead to mass dead zones at an accelerated rate. That's what we're going to talk about today here on the Speak Up For Blue Podcast. Welcome to the Speak Up For Blue Podcast, helping you get involved in ocean conservation. And now, here's your host, loves football so much. I mean he really really likes it, Andrew Lewin. Hey everybody, welcome back to the Speak Up For Blue Podcast. Your voice for the ocean. I am your host Andrew Lewin, founder of SpeakUpForBlue.com, marine ecologist and self-proclaimed oceanpreneur. That's right, everything I do in business, everything I do as an entrepreneur has to do with conserving protecting the ocean. Really, I want to teach you guys and guide you guys how to live for a better ocean. That's what I do here at Speak Up For Blue and this podcast is a way for me to reach out to you. So if you haven't listened to this podcast before because it is fairly new. We just started this, I just launched this back in the end of June of 2015, depending on when you're listening to this. So it's been about four and a half months and we just passed last Friday on an episode 56. We just passed 10,000 downloads. So I really want to thank the people who continue to listen to this episode. Now if you haven't listened to this episode before or this podcast before, I really explain what's happening. What's going on in the ocean news and ocean conservation news to help you understand what's happening, whether it be an ocean issue that we have to address or a solution that we can use to address such ocean issues or make them better or reduce those ocean issues. That's what we do here at Speak Up For Blue. That's what we're all about. We're here to guide you to live a better life for the ocean and we need to do that judging on the ocean issues that we've covered over the last four months and four and a half months. And so I appreciate you guys to continue listening, raising that awareness and acting on the solutions that we discuss here on the Speak Up For Blue podcast, which leads me to sort of an ad that we have here at speakupforblue.com. It really helps you address how to get over that overwhelm of ocean conservation. When you first get into the ocean and you understand, start understanding what is happening and the issues, you get a bit of an overwhelm. It's very common. You don't have to worry about it. Just take a breath. Don't feel too overwhelmed. You can do something about a lot of these ocean issues, whether it be climate change, ocean acidification, which includes ocean acidification, sea level rise, rising temperatures. You can do something about that. If it includes overfishing, you can do something about that. You can do all these things. And here at Speak Up For Blue, we have launched a Speak Up For Blue online store to help you help the ocean. That's what we're here to do. So that's what we've done. Every time you buy an item at Speak Up For Blue.com/shop, you help support our partner Sea Turtles Forever. And what Sea Turtles Forever does is they are a charitable nonprofit organization that has a small organization that have a huge impact. They do really two things that are massive. They work in Central America with local communities to protect the local sea turtle populations. Essentially, they do some patrolling of when sea turtle nests are there. There's about three to four hundred sea turtles hatchlings that will want to hatch and get back into the ocean. What happens there is during that time, poachers come by, they take the eggs and they sell them. The problem is it's not a very sustainable business to sell poached eggs. So what Sea Turtles Forever does is one patrols the nest to make sure they don't get poached. The other one is they actually work with local communities to turn that poaching business into an ecotourism business, which helps both the sea turtles and the local community reach a sustainable business long-term sustainable business, which is great. Plus, they help these seven sea turtle species, which are all endangered or at risk at some level or another. So great work there. They also get involved in beach cleanups, which is a big impact to sea turtles and other animals. There's a lot of plastics out there and debris that get caught in animal digestive systems. Either they choke on them physically or they actually ingest them and when the plastics break down they have toxins in it. It gets into the system that eventually they die or they move up. Those toxins move up the food web as animals with these toxins get eaten. It bioaccumulates in larger animals and you see, that's when a lot of times you see whales, marine mammals, larger predators get, they get, they basically die from these toxins. So it's a big problem. Sea Turtles Forever has come up with an innovative tool to clean up microplastics from beaches. So these are micro, these are like microscopic plastics. It's just like basically plastic shards on the beach. You've seen them everywhere. They're all over beaches everywhere and now the the tool is so effective that state governments are actually using them to in their cleanup, their beach cleanup process, which is fantastic. So this small organization, Sea Turtles Forever, is not only helping sea turtles and other marine species, but they're helping other state governments help clean up the beaches, which is fantastic. So if you want to purchase an item from there, you get from this from our shop, you can go speakupforblue.com/shop and right as you would make a purchase, you are automatically helping our partner because any revenue we make after cost goes right towards this organization. I cut a check every month for them. I'm looking forward to cutting a check every month for them. We just started this program if you're new to this this podcast. So anyway, let's get into today's episode because we're going to talk about ocean warming and another effect that it might potentially have or will have in the future. I know I've talked a lot about Pacific warming El Nino, the blob, the Pacific decadal oscillation. We've been talking about that a lot because it's a big deal and you may get sick of it, but there's another consequence of a Pacific warming, such as the blob or El Nino. Massive warmings have been detected in a study back 11,000 to 14,000 years ago where there have been significant accelerated significant dead zones in the ocean. Now what a dead zone means is essentially an area where there's low oxygen. Usually on the bottom of the ocean, there's masses of amount of area that are low in oxygen, a depleted oxygen that can't really sustain a lot of species. Now if you know or do not know the bottom, the bottom like one and a half meters or two meters of the ocean is very important. It's very diverse with a lot of worms and a lot of invertebrates like crabs and shrimp and lobsters and all sorts of things that are found around the world. It's a high diverse area that's very important in the entire cycling of the ocean. Once those dead zones come in, it could also impact fishing and all that kind of stuff. Once those dead zones come into play, you get a very abrupt change in the ocean sort of demographics, I guess. The diversity goes down. It's a less stable environment. You never know what's going to happen. Now 11,000 to 14,000 years ago was the end of the last ice age and they were saying the onset of this warming really brought in these dead zones. So non-diverse, just depleted oxygen kind of zones. And the way it happens is it's not just the warming that occurs, but the warming allows a proliferation of what we call diatoms. They're essentially these phytoplankton, they're plankton species, microscopic species that are plants. They're one cell, unicellular plants. And when the heat comes in, a lot of times in spring you'll get a bloom of phytoplankton. And then that bloom eventually dies because they have a very low or they have a very quick life cycle. That bloom will sink to the bottom as it dies. As it sinks to the bottom of the ocean, it will get eaten or basically get decomposed by the bacteria, the microbiotic food web. When that happens, when bacteria break it down, it takes oxygen out of the water in that process, that breakdown process, and then it puts in CO2. Or methane actually, it's methane that it puts out. So there's an input of oxygen, an output of methane, which is basically a greenhouse gas and that gets put into the ocean and eventually goes into the atmosphere. One of the major areas, the major dead zones, have been documented for decades or I guess probably over two decades, is down in the Gulf of Mexico. And the output of the Mississippi River, which is a major river system in the US, goes out into the Gulf of Mexico. In the spring there's a large bloom that goes, so there's a large phytoplankton bloom. Eventually that phytoplankton bloom will die, it'll sink to the bottom and it'll get it'll get eaten and decomposed by bacteria, oxygen taken out of the water, methane put back in the water, and you have this mass dead zone. Now the dead zone has been different sizes depending on how big the bloom is that year, and how warm the water is, and how low the winds are. In the summer, the winds die down in the Gulf of Mexico, so you don't get as much mixing of the water from the bottom to the top. That will cause a lot of problems. So what happens is there's a massive area, sometimes it's 22,000 kilometers squared, sometimes it's more, sometimes it's less, it keeps expanding though over time, and sometimes it goes from Mississippi River all the way over to Texas and so forth. So it usually hits the northern part of the Gulf of Mexico, where the Mississippi kind of comes out, the Mississippi bloom. So this can happen in the Pacific, it's happened before in the Pacific, and what we're worried about is that it's going to have, or the researchers are worried about, it's going to happen again because there is a mass warming of the blob, and in the high Pacific, the northern Pacific. And like I said before, warming doesn't, it's not the only key factor that has to happen for a huge diatom bloom. Nutrients such as phosphate and nitrate and iron have to come into play. And in that area in the high Pacific, the north Pacific, especially along the Bering Sea and so forth, you get a big influx of nutrients coming from the bottom. So all that stuff that's breaking down, that's going down to the bottom, comes back up in an upwelling, and then that just feeds the diatoms at the right time, and the diatoms just bloom even more. The diatoms have a heavier shell in comparison with all the other phytoplankton, they sink faster, and then that just, though it gets decomposed even more, and then that just cycle happens over and over and over again. As long as there's diatoms at the surface, they'll bloom, they'll sink, and they'll come back, and then there'll be another life cycle and so forth. So this is, the researchers are worried that this is going to cost a massive dead zone, which can have a lot of effects on very different things. It can have a lot of effects on just the circulation in general. It can have effect, well, I mean, getting a loss of species down at the bottom of the ocean, which can affect just diversity and just the energy of the food web and so forth. It can affect fish, which will affect fishing, which will affect the economy. There are a lot of different things that will affect, and if you get these mass dead zones, if this keeps feeding, and the whole Pacific right now is going through a warming, you know, with El Nino happening in the south, you have the Decadal, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation happening in the mid Pacific, then you have the Blob happening at the north, they all meet, it gets even warmer, and that's just a constant feedback that happens and happens and happens, so you're going to get more and more dead zones around the Pacific, which is a huge deal. That is a big deal, so researchers are worried about, we should worry about it. The one big thing that we need to do that you can do, and then I can do, is really decrease our climate change impact, right? That's the key. That is the key. We all have to take part, lower energy use. That is our biggest thing. If you, like one simple thing you can do, if you look around your house and you look at all the energy inefficiencies that we have in a house, I have an older house, so I have a lot of draft coming in and out of the house. If I'm trying to heat my house, it can cause more energy to heat the house. I recently put in a digital thermometer, and sort of like a bit of a smart thermometer on my heating and furnace. I live on Canada, we need some heat, also air conditioning in the summer, so what we do is we set it at a specific temperature in the winter, or as it gets cooler, and we say, "Okay, if it gets below 70 degrees Fahrenheit, then we'll heat it." If, then the heat comes on. If, and at night, if it's 68 degrees, the heat comes on, you can set it at different times. So, when we're away during the day, we set it at 68 degrees. When we come home at night, we set it at 70, so the energy is not being used too much, right? We're using less energy than we would at keeping it at 70 all the time. So, the smart thermometers, or digital timers, or whatever you want to call them, they can have an actual big impact, not only on your energy efficiencies, but also on your bill, on your energy bill, that's a big thing. So, it's important to keep those in mind when you do things, drive less, right? Use more energy efficient transportation, use public transportation, walk more, use your bicycle, all that kind of stuff. Well, one, it'll help your health. It has many benefits, of course, but two, it'll, it'll just decrease your energy use. So, all of this stuff works, and if everybody starts doing it, or more people start doing it, then it works towards decreasing climate change effects. That's what we need to do. We need to decrease this warming effect by using less energy, and being more efficient in our daily use, and that will help, not only on our health and on our bills, but the environment in general, which is essentially our lifeblood, right? So, we're going to need to do that over and over and over again. So, this warming can cause massive dead zones. That can be a big play on our eventually on our economy, but also just on the ocean in general, the whole circulation part of the way it functions, we have to be careful. I wanted you guys to know this. I know it's a big thing, and you don't think you have a lot of say in it, or what happened, or it can't be stopped right away, but eventually it can be reduced and stopped. And I fully believe that, and you should too, and you should start today. As soon as you listen to this, start today. Use less energy. That is your big action item for the week, for the month for the rest of your life. Use less energy, be more efficient. Think about what you're doing every time you use energy. All right, so that's what I have to say for today, and if you want to find out something else you can do is you can go to our shop, and you can, speak up for blue.com/shop, and you can actually buy an item, and you can help sea turtles and help beach cleanups and all that stuff. It's a wonderful, wonderful support organization for the wonderful organization, or support system for a wonderful organization called Sea Turtles Forever. I've been working with them, or I've been in contact with them for three years, and I know Mark Ward, the president very well, and we're getting to know each other more and more, and we're going to help each other out on projects to help get his projects done, because like I said before, they're a small organization, so I look forward to that partnership with Mark Ward and the people at Sea Turtles Forever. So that's it for me today. I hope you enjoyed the episode. Happy Monday, by the way. I hope your weekend was great. You've been listening to the Speak Us with Blue podcast. I am your host,