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Climate Change May Be Stoking Stronger Winds, Altered Oceans
The specter of an ocean floor littered with dead shellfish, rock fish, sea stars and other marine life off the Oregon coast spurred Mark Snyder, a climate change expert, to investigate whether California's coast faced a similar calamity.
Sunset is seen over the sea. Global warming may create "dead zones" in the ocean that would be devoid of fish and seafood and endure for up to two millennia, according to a study published on Sunday. (AFP/File/Adek Berry) It could, the UC Santa Cruz earth scientist said, citing climate change, which some scientists believe is responsible for stronger and more persistent winds along the coast. There's no debate that windier conditions drive more upwelling of nutrient-rich deep ocean waters.
At normal levels, this upwelling sustains the abundance of marine life, but too much of these rich waters leads to a boom-and-bust cycle that ultimately creates ocean "dead zones" with little or no oxygen. Marine life that can't swim or scuttle away from these lethal zones suffocate.
To assess future wind and upwelling scenarios along the California coast, Snyder and his colleagues at UC Santa Cruz ran climate simulations for two time periods. One spanned from 1968 to 2000, verifying the accuracy of the modeling. The second simulated the region's estimated climate from 2038 to 2070, using the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change "high-growth" emissions projections. Snyder said he chose the high emissions scenario because today's are exceeding earlier IPCC estimates.
The results showed increases in wind speeds of as much as 2 meters per second, a 40 percent increase from current wind speeds, which now average 5 meters per second, Snyder said.
The change in wind speeds is already happening, Snyder said. California winds have been growing in strength in the past 30 years.
Snyder said he knows his hypothesis needs more research, so he'll know whether to continue pursuing it or to discard it. The latter is unlikely, he said, given the new cycle of dead zones on the Oregon and Washington coasts that started in 2002.
"It was just chance they found the dead zones in Oregon," Snyder said, describing how fishers reported to marine scientists an alarming number of dead or dying crabs they were pulling up in traps.
"It's quite possible these areas could be off the California coast," he said.
After the Oregon fishers reported their sickly catches, and divers described seeing bottom-dwelling fish in high waters or schools of fishes massing near an invisible wall - behind which was low-oxygen water - scientists from Oregon State University, along with state and federal marine experts, began investigating.
That year, and in years since, researchers have sent down a robot equipped with a video camera to record the carnage. They've also deployed a fleet of robotic "gliders" to maintain constant vigil on oxygen levels and other conditions along the Oregon coast, as well as a sophisticated monitoring buoy.
The worst year recorded was 2006, with the dead zone near the coast spreading from southern Oregon into Washington, where dead fish and crabs washed up on beaches along the Olympic Peninsula. Less severe dead zones returned in 2007.
"We've seen areas that are carpeted with dead marine life," said Oregon State marine ecologist Francis Chan. One video image stuck in his mind: A large dead sea star that must have been decades old, rotting in the water. Marine life such as that, which adhere to rocks most of their lives, can't scurry away from suffocating waters, he said. "It was pretty striking."
In normal years, winds blowing from north to south drive upwelling in the spring and summer months off the Pacific Coast. These strengthened winds drive surface waters offshore, making room for deeper, nutrient-rich waters to surface, where sunlight triggers a heavy growth of phytoplankton, the bottom rung of the marine food chain.
But when the winds don't slacken and upwelling persists, excess phytoplankton blooms. When the uneaten plankton dies and sinks to the ocean floor, bacteria consuming it deplete the oxygen in the water.
Like so many other climate change projections, the scientists know they can't definitely point to greenhouse gases as the sole culprit behind windier conditions along the coast. But no other explanation fits, given the historical patterns of winds and upwelling, according to a primer from Oregon State on hypoxia, the technical term for oxygen depletion in waters.
A phenomenon called El Niño, which cycles in and out, doesn't explain it, or what's known as decadal oscillations, Chan said. "They're not at play here," Chan said. "So something else is likely at play."
Other scientists aren't convinced that wind-driven upwelling is occurring off the California coast. It is known that oxygen levels have been declining in deeper waters since 1984, when researchers started monitoring it in California coastal waters.
"That's something we're seeing along the California coast," said Frank Schwing, an oceanographer with the Southwest Fisheries Science Center in Pacific Grove.
Although large bodies of oxygen-poor water far offshore are normal, the rapid expansion of these waters is not. And scientists link it, in part, to climate change, Schwing said.
These offshore low-oxygen waters in California differ from dead zones in Oregon. The latter are close to shore, where they've never been seen before, and they're killing sea life. Such die-offs haven't been seen in California.
"If you drive up Highway 101, you're not going to look far off to see dead zones," said Chan, with Oregon State. "They're less than a mile from the surf zone." But the expansion of these large volumes of hypoxic water far off the California coast does increase the odds they could reach the coastline, Schwing said. It also narrows the band of oxygen-rich surface waters far offshore that can sustain life.
"The implication is it's easier to create these hypoxic events," Schwing said.
For Chan, the phenomenon drives home the sensitivity and dynamism of the ocean, which responds swiftly to atmospheric changes.
"We shouldn't be seeing these big changes, not in something as simple as oxygen levels on our coast," he said. "And we're seeing these big flips."
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12 Comments so far
Show AllDead zones can and should be cured.
You can buy, for around $3,000, a device which blows air into the water, feeding oxygen into the water when the wind isn't blowing. These devices are currently used to aerate polluted harbors.
We think nothing of preventing forest fires, or of putting naturally-caused forest fires out before they burn up cities. Why not extend our stewardship to harbor, bay and ocean dead zones? It's so cheap to fix!
I suggest you rethink your solution as it's very impractical and would generate even more carbon emissions. We're talking about hundreds of square MILES of ocean, not a few within an enclosed bay or harbor.
Related to the increased winds is the increase in longevity of large low and high pressure cells that drive regional weather; the very long-lived high sitting off of Southern California for the past several months is an example. The artifacts of Global Warming are many. The way weather patterns appear to be changing in the USA means big trouble for Texas and California, whose longterm droughts are already accelerating, with related problems elsewhere. The migration of the Hadley Cells toward higher latitudes will continue throughout the century, with further dire outcomes. And currently since emission amounts are closely linked to economic output, we would need a 90% drop in economic activity to stop CO2 level growth somewhat above current levels.
In a related issue, we may, just may, be facing an unusual end to the normal 11 year solar sunspot cycle and an extended period of extreme solar quiet - the first such period since the Maunder Minimum 360 years ago. Two years after what should have been the normal beginning of a new solar cycle, the sun is instead at unprecedented quiet levels since modern observations began. Solar wind has declined far below any previous observations.
The Maunder Mininum has been associated with the sharply colder climate of the 17t hand early 18th century.
This does not in any way discount the anthropogenic global warming consensus. Human carbon emissions are superimposed on any other normal natural events and are a stonger forcing on climate than any but very infrequent and temporary natural events. But if this unusual solar quiet continues, it just might be an incredible stroke of luck that could buy us the time we need.
No, this does NOT you should go out and buy a Cadillac Escalade.
You can follow the sun from real time from the deep-space SOHO spacecraft here:
http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/
---USAn
I have been windsurfing up and down the west coast for 20 years, from Vancouver Island to Baja and inland water ways, such as the Sacramento River Delta and San Luis Reservoir in Los Banos, California. The marine layers on the Monterey Bay, caused by upwelling, have definitely diminished in the last four or five years. They are not as deep and do not stay on or close to the land as long as they used to do, which reduces the amount of thermal wind in terms of both velocity and durability that windsurfers enjoy in the inland valleys of California.
Clear, non-foggy days on the ocean allow for more sunlight warming the surface, which causes upwelling and results in more wind offshore and less thermal wind blowing inland. Fifteen or twenty years ago we would see big fat 1800-foot marine layers park over the Monterey Bay and we would grab our windsurfing gear and head inland where we could sail for many days in fierce, angry wind, which we loved. It would often blow as much as 40 mph for days in the summer, but now we seldom see even one full day of wind at San Luis Reservoir and it will be in the 15-20 mph range. Just my own observations here, based on a lot of time on the water and in the wind.
"At normal levels, this upwelling sustains the abundance of marine life, but too much of these rich waters leads to a boom-and-bust cycle that ultimately creates ocean "dead zones" with little or no oxygen. Marine life that can't swim or scuttle away from these lethal zones suffocate."
How 'bout that? Economic bubbles creating ecologic bubbles, and both are bad for people and other living things.
Too many cars, too many trucks, too many powerplants, too many homes, too many cities, too many farms, too many jets, too many ships, too many cows, too many dogs, too many cats, too much plastic, too many chemicals, too much garbage, too much stuff and too many people make it increasingly harder to fix things.
karlof1, thanks for the link to the drought chart. living in the part of texas that is listed in the exceptional drought category has created, several years in the running, cause for great alarm. long gone are the cold and wet winters - where as a young child and even into the teenage years - that gave all the ranchers problems as their cattle wallowed around in pastures, for weeks on end, up to their bellies in mud. long gone are the autumn rains that nourished the farmer's small grain crops as well as assuring the following spring's spectacular wildflower display. instead, we now have cold and dry and fierce winter winds, drying out the already parched land. cracks in the ground, a solid indicator of drought conditions, have begun to fill with a fine powder-like dust. what were once beautiful grasslands are now severly overgrazed and barren tracts of rock and dirt. gone are the responsible ranchers who were once considered the stewards of the land. hilll country streams, creeks and rivers have begun to disappear. the seeps and springs are distant memories. the similarity of this weather condition- coupled with the financial crisis - to the dust bowl era is hauntingly eerie.
of course, we should all count our blessings that sigurdur11 and goblue have failed to respond to this article.
Instead I announce myself as Sigurdur_11's nemesis.....
We developed a relationship in a long argument after an earlier piece on Common Dreams Faster Climate Change Feared - http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2008/12/26-7?page=1
There my facts refuted hus endless series of cobbled semi-lunatic assertions.... and I could see that really these guys are just predictable freaks, who hang out on Common Dreams trolling around making the same twerpish arguments, getting refuted time and time again...
The same 'petitions', logarithmic cosmic rays, solar cycles, oodles of wacko arguments drudged out of the pits of the internet..... Made true just because they believe it to be so.
PJD:
You have it right. Cycle 24 is not only 2 years behind in starting robustly, but 3 weeks ago there was a remnant of cycle 23 observed.
The potential of a Maudner Minnimum seems more plausable every day. IF that does come to pass, our temps will slide even further and quicker.
Tiz a very scary thought to think of us lapsing into something similiar to a Little Ice Age.
GETTING BEYOND THE DOUBTERS - SOMETHING USEFUL TO READ ABOUT....
Some highly recommended You Tube videos from a recent conference:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6JK9dAvfdI&feature=related
and http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=GB&hl=en-GB&v=qKa_VCWbGJ0
Interesting to watch - tell me if, or why, the opinions are wrong...
This comes from:
www.arts.manchester.ac.uk/lti/projects/religionandclimatechange/futureethics/
workshop3/workshop3reports/
Take a look at the starter papers, and particularly at Aaran Stibbe’s paper
Finally you can see here an interview with Roman Krznaric, a writer and teacher on creative thinking about the art of living and social change.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ay0ZbmW2Ias&feature=related
and Roman's excellent paper Empathy and Climate Change: Proposals for a Revolution of Human Relationships. Get it here:
http://www.romankrznaric.com/Publications/
Empathy%20and%20Climate%20Change%20Krznaric.pdf
You heard about all this here, first.......
Smiling....nemisis eh?
All of our varied postings have basis in facts. While I don't ignore your view of the facts, you choose to ignore mine, and that is your right.
Time will prove me correct and you wrong, so as the old saying goes.....time is on my side.