PLANKTON WILL STOP MAKING OXYGEN BY END OF CENTURY

PLANKTON WILL STOP MAKING OXYGEN BY END OF CENTURY

TAG CONSULTING ARBOR Tim Michau TAG CONSULTING ARBOR Tim Michau

TAG CONSULTING ARBOR Tim Michau

Senior Arborist

发布日期: 2017年11月21日
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Russ George / June 17, 2016 / 1 Comment / Bad News For The Planet

Researchers reveal how Earth’s oxygen could collapse with ocean warming of just 6 degrees

The collapse of ocean oxygen production is far worse than the threat of sea level rise and flooding.

If true and not remedied Himalayan breathing masks may become a necessity in major cities.

The news is not all bad there is real hope to learn about at the end of this post.

A study of ocean plankton led by Sergei Petrovskii, Professor in Applied Mathematics (specializing in ecological mathematics) from the University of Leicester’s Department of Mathematics, has shown that an increase in the water temperature of the world’s oceans of around six degrees Celsius – which some scientists predict could occur as soon as 2100 – could stop oxygen production by phytoplankton by disrupting the process of photosynthesis. The paper Mathematical Modelling of Plankton–Oxygen Dynamics Under the Climate Change was published in late 2015 in the Journal Applied Mathematics.

“By 2100, the earth at sea level could have atmospheric oxygen levels comparable to the top of Mount Everest today. And as far as I know, people cannot normally stay on Everest without oxygen masks for more than a few minutes,” Petrovskii said.

Global Ocean Heat Rising Dramatically Over 50 Years – click to enlarge

Professor Petrovskii explained: “Global warming has been a focus of attention of science and politics for about two decades now. A lot has been said about its expected disastrous consequences; perhaps the most notorious is the global flooding that may result from melting of Antarctic ice if the warming exceeds a few degrees compared to the pre-industrial level. However, it now appears that this is probably not even close to the biggest danger that the warming can cause to the humanity.”


Additional support for the model comes from direct measurement of a mysterious decline of oxygen in the atmosphere. Within the past several years scientists have found that oxygen (O2) in the atmosphere has been dropping, and at higher rates than just the amount that goes into the increase of CO2 from burning fossil fuels, some 2 to 4-times as much, and accelerating since 2002-2003. Simultaneously, oxygen levels in the world’s oceans have also been falling in an expanding fashion for the past fifty years, and will continue into the foreseeable future.


Phytoplankton outnumber all but the bacteria on the blue planet – click to enlarge

The fundamental cause of oxygen decline in the oceans that has not been mentioned in many studies is the failure of phytoplankton in the oceans to regenerate oxygen by photosynthesis. Phytoplankton is responsible for most of the primary productivity in the oceans that supports the entire marine food web and accounts for the majority of the planet’s primary production from photosynthesis.

Phytoplankton grows more than a thousand times faster than green plants on land, turning over in 2 to 6 days compared to ~19 years on average for land plants, forests take centuries. However, collapse of vital mineral dust has interrupted and collapsed ocean primary productivity at a rate of 1% per year, this in turn had resulted in damaging feedback mechanisms of ocean warming and acidification which are further accelerating the catastrophic damage to the largest and most potent ecosystem on this blue planet the all important ocean pastures and their phytoplankton.


An Endangered Plankton Bloom near the Shetland Islands June 2016 as seen from space in true color. The whitish area is a cocolithophore bloom, a group whose loss in past ages has resulted in mass extinctions – click to read more

The threat has been “mostly overlooked by climate scientists”, Petrovskii said, “noting that such a global disaster would come with little notice.”

“A distinct feature of this catastrophe is that there will be few warning signs and little change before it is too late,” he said. “That’s because phytoplankton can continue to produce oxygen and photosynthesize at levels below 6 degrees of temperature rise. Under a 2-degree increase, we will probably see no change; the 4-degree increase would already be dangerously close.”

“About two-thirds of the planet’s total atmospheric oxygen is produced by ocean phytoplankton – and therefore cessation would result in the depletion of atmospheric oxygen on a global scale. This would likely result in the mass mortality of animals and humans.”

The Leicester academic team developed a new mathematical ecology model of oxygen production in the ocean that takes into account one fundamental aspect of the ecology of ocean plankton pastures, surface sea temperature. While healthy ocean pastures feed all of ocean life they also perform a vital role in producing most of the world’s oxygen, even more importantly they control and sustain their favoured environment by performing ‘plankton cooling’ which they accomplish by creating clouds.

Clouds in our planets skies reflect 25% of the suns heat and much dangerous UV radiation back into space. In fact the majority of clouds that moderate the climate on our blue planet come from ocean pasture plankton blooms that require shelter from both heat and heat and UV sunburns. The University of Leicester team did not factor in plankton cooling clouds in their reported model; we hope they are working on model revisions that will do so.

Rain and Dust in the wind are the Yin and Yang for pastures on land and at sea. Click to read more

Ocean plant life has been observed to be in cataclysmic decline for at least 50 years, that decline has amounted to 1% per year of ocean green plants disappearing leaving behind dying ocean pastures that are becoming blue deserts.


The principal cause of this collapse of ocean green plants is our high and rising CO2 that is creating a dramatic global greening across the lands of Earth. More grass growing means less dust blowing and it is dust in the wind that is vital for ocean pasture plant life, just as much as rain in the wind is vital for pastures on land.

Those blue deserts, our oceans, cover 72% of this blue planet so this is a very big problem. To put the ocean plant crisis into a terrestrial perspective in each 5 year span over the past 50 years an equivalent amount of ocean green plant life and photosynthesis has been eradicated as if we were to cut down the entire Amazon Rainforest. So add up the deadly toll, in the past 50 years we have eradicated the equivalent to 10 entire Amazon Rainforests! The world is full of alarm and concern about the state of the present day Amazon which has suffered a loss of just 20% of its trees.

Team Spirit ?

While mainstream research often focuses on the CO2 cycle, as carbon dioxide is the agent said to be mainly responsible for global warming, only a few researchers have explored the effects of global warming on oxygen production. In addition there is a widespread bias in the world of science which seems to be divided into ‘teams’ which are highly competitive and defensive.

Team “Earth” which has an overwhelming majority of members and fans is determined to represent ‘Earth-bound life’ as being the most important in spite of the fact that this is a blue planet.

Team “Ocean” suffers from having very few members and even fewer fans but does seem to have a clear claim on the fact that the vast majority of life on this blue planet, 95% of life, lives in the 72% of the planet that is oceans. The result of absurd competitive human nature overflowing into science is that the crisis in the ocean has been badly understated.

The misdirection of news and effort toward the trillion dollar climate change solutions while eschewing the low cost million dollar immediate and sustainable solution to the far greater crisis of loss of plankton cooling and ocean warming has a terrible consequence.

Our Ocean Hope Spot

It’s not to late to restore and regenerate ocean plankton, our greatest ally. The power of the ocean to manage it’s temperature and our entire planetary climate is far greater than commonly represented. It is not too late, by restoring ocean plant life to recent levels of health and abundance the ocean plankton can rapidly save itself and us!

Reference: The paper ‘Mathematical Modelling of Plankton–Oxygen Dynamics Under the Climate Change’ published in the Bulletin of Mathematical Biology is available here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11538-015-0126-0

GLOBAL OCEAN OXYGEN EMERGENCY DECLARED AS OXYGEN PLUMMETS

Russ George / February 15, 2017 / Leave a comment / Bad News For The Planet

A major paper in the Journal Nature reports on stunning 2% decline in ocean oxygen in just 50 years, it will plummet to a 7% loss before the end of this century!

Earth’s Age of Oxygen coming to an end?

Only 15% of the decline is associated with global/ocean warming, something is far more fundamentally wrong with the ocean’s oxygen.

What might be done? Natural, not artificial, respiration is needed immediately! Only ocean restoration can provide the oxygen respiration this blue planet needs.

A massive synthesis of ocean science just published its report on the 2% decline in the amount of dissolved oxygen in all of the world’s oceans. The paper, published Wednesday in the journal Nature by oceanographer Sunke Schmidtko and two colleagues from the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Kiel, Germany, reports on the decline of more than 2 percent in ocean oxygen content worldwidebetween 1960 and 2010. The loss, however, is worse than this global average in some oceans. The largest overall volume of oxygen was lost in the Pacific ocean but as a percentage, the decline greatest in the Arctic Ocean.

Remarkably while ‘climate change’ aka global warming has long been touted as predicting such a decline in ocean oxygen due to ocean warming the report shows that a mere 15% is due to the warming effects that reduce the capacity of ocean water to hold oxygen. There is something far more fundamentally powerful that is causing the oceans to lose their life-sustaining oxygen.

This blog has been reporting on the ocean oxygen crisis for years. – click to read more

Oceans Make The Majority Of The World’s Oxygen

As much as it has been the fashion of terrestrial science to report that the ‘lungs of the earth’ are its terrestrial rainforests which have been said to make half of the oxygen we breathe, the fact is that the oceans produce the vast majority of our oxygen, perhaps 8 out of every 10 breaths you breathe comes from ocean plant-life and photosynthesis. Numerous scientific papers have revealed that ocean photosynthesis is down by at least 40% in the past 50 years. All of that lost photosynthesis was producing prodigious amounts of ocean oxygen that is now clearly seen to be missing.

To put our Blue Planet’s oxygen into a geologic time context over the past million years the oxygen content here on Earth dropped, but it did so by a mere 0.7%! That’s ~1/3 of the reported recent drop and 1/10th of what this report suggests might happen by the end of this century when the 7% loss has occurred. That’s the ‘million to one’ bet against us, or rather against our great grandchildren, that looks to be a sure thing if we do nothing but sit back and engaged in endless argument.

Want a more personal context? Oxygen levels in your air is said to be about 20-21% globally, but it varies greatly and in many cities, even some at sea level, the O2 level is already down to 12%! At 8% O2 human’s and most higher life suffocates. Do the math, is the hometown of you and your grandchildren able to sustain life with a 7% decline in oxygen during the remaining of this century? Seems to me that 12-7=5, yikes that is not good.  Ed note: This is overly simplified science but about what one can do in a blog as the air/sea flux of oxygen is terribly complex.): 

Ocean oxygen is vital to all life including marine organisms, but also very complex to define in the marine world — unlike in the atmosphere, where gases mix together vigorously and thoroughly, in the ocean that is far harder to accomplish, Schmidtko explained. Moreover, he added, just 1 percent of all the Earth’s available oxygen dissolves down into the ocean. The ocean sends far more oxygen into the air than it takes in. Most experts agree that the air gets ~85% of its oxygen from the oceans. This makes sense as the atmosphere contains about 1 billion tonnes of oxygen while the oceans contain as much as 100-1000 billion tonnes of oxygen. It’s ocean oxygen that fuels this planet, and its ocean plants that make that oxygen.

Climate change, aka global warming, models predict that with ocean warming they will lose oxygen. The obvious simple physics is that warmer water has the capacity to hold less oxygen. “It’s the same reason we keep our sparkling drinks pretty cold,”Schmidtko said. But the report shows that this global warming ocean warming effect is far from the answer to the global ocean oxygen emergency.


Understanding how ocean micro plants make the oxygen you breathe. – click to read more

Oxygen in the ocean comes from the atmosphere (a small contribution) and from the photosynthetic activity of marine microorganisms – the major contribution. Ocean oxygen production takes place exclusively in the sunlit zone near the surface where ocean pasture grass, the phytoplankton grow and repurpose CO2 into new biomass and oxygen. But as that sunlit upper oxygen producing layer warms up, the oxygen-rich waters are less likely to mix down into cooler layers of the ocean because the warm waters are less dense and do not sink as readily.

As ocean pasture plankton perish their loss eliminates the world’s major source of oxygen and plankton cooling – click to read more

Ocean phyto-plankton evolved to not only produce more plankton and oxygen but also to create and sustain its environment that it needs to survive. Ocean pasture plankton are the principal source of cloud nucleating particles that keep this Blue Planet in the Goldilock’s Zone of our solar system. The earth is just a wee bit too far into the hot zone of our sun and the phytoplankton clouds have evolved the means to provide us with cooling shade so that we are neither tooo hot nor tooo cold, but ahhh just right.


The new study represents a synthesis of literally “millions” of separate ocean measurements over time, according to researchers.

Matthew Long, an oceanographer from the National Center for Atmospheric Research who has published on ocean oxygen loss, said he considers the new results “robust”and a “major advance in synthesizing observations to examine oxygen trends on a global scale.”

Long’s research had previously demonstrated that ocean oxygen loss was expected to occur and that it should soon be possible to demonstrate that in the real world through measurements, despite the complexities involved in studying the global ocean and deducing trends about it.

“That’s just what the new study has done” , he says.

The synthesis of all available done in this new paper show a global-scale decline in oxygen that conforms to the patterns we expect from human-driven ocean change. The study defers pointing a single finger of blame, but it is strongly pointing at human-driven ocean collapse as a root cause of the oxygen decline.

The new study underscores once again that the most profound consequences of high and rising CO2 are occurring in the oceans, rather than on land.

“It is alarming to see this signal begin to emerge clearly in the observational data,” says Long.
“Far-reaching implications for marine ecosystems and fisheries can be expected,”  write the researchers.

There is only one thing that might be done! Save the oceans with natural, not artificial, respiration.

That hope, perhaps our last hope, is to restore and sustain ocean pastures and their oxygen producing plankton. In restoring the oceans to historic levels of health and abundance their, and our, vital oxygen might be restored as opposed to being lost. You can read everywhere on this blog about how we have proven we can restore our oceans to health and how the Voyages of Recovery on behalf of this Blue Planet’s ocean pastures have begun. Join me.

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Tags: "global warming", "ocean pasture", "primary production", global emergency, ocean oxygen, phytoplankton

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