One of the most hidden and potentially dangerous impacts of global warming is the impact on the oceans.  Life in the oceans can go on without terrestrial life, but without the oceans, life on land would be impossible.  Phytoplankton in the ocean are responsible for half of the planet’s oxygen. To survive, they depend on the pH of the ocean being the one they’ve adapted to.  Ocean pH has been about the same for more than 20 million years.

And we’re changing it — faster than the organisms in the ocean can adapt.

This is a key issue we talk about on our Coasts and Islands course, but is a hard topic to explain and teach about.  Here is a great  film out from the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC.org) on ocean acidification and its impact on climate and life in the oceans.

ACID TEST, a film produced by NRDC, was made to raise awareness about the largely unknown problem of ocean acidification, which poses a fundamental challenge to life in the seas and the health of the entire planet. Like global warming, ocean acidification stems from the increase of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere since the start of the Industrial Revolution.

Highly recommended!  You can jump to their webpage for more information and background, including in-depth discussions of the science.

Jeremy, Rebecca and Jonathan with their host families (Bang I'et, Ma' and A'Lee). From Jeremey's blog.

The students are back from the coastal course – sea kayaking through mangroves, skin diving reefs, camping on the beach, and living with host families in a small fishing village on the coast of Trang. While we had a few big storms, the weather was good overall, and it was a great course – the students really got into the material, worked (and played) hard, and learned a lot. A highlight of the course, and a great capstone to the semester, is staying with the host families in this mostly Muslim fishing village. The families are amazing, their hospitality humbling, creating a very real connection between the students and their families.

Here are some highlights from the student blogs:

From Acadia:

As we came back to our guesthouse on Ko Mook from snorkelling off Ko Chu-ah, the tide was very low, exposing the extensive mud flats offshore of Ko Mook. Our boats went in as far as they could and we walked the rest of the way in to the island. While a long pier juts out a little ways down along the road to remedy (partially) this problem, it is not used much by local residents. Instead, they walk and haul their catch sometimes 150 yards, preferring to leave their boats cradled in the soft intertidal zone. Thinking about another extreme, NYC, where every shoreline has been extended with landfill and concrete piers, it seems in many ways the villagers on Ko Mook have got it right.

The night before, students reflected on how people here seem to have stronger relationships with natural cycles and phenomena than we do in the U.S. This has been a recurring theme throughout my time here in Thailand. In part because of the favorable climate, folks are able to incorporate a lot of outdoor space into their primary living area and seem to like this set-up despite the bugs and rain and critters passing through. Nature still has the upper hand in the local community on Ko Mook, as well. Low season for the tourism industry occurs during the monsoon season when the channel is too choppy for the island’s small boats to safely transport visitors. On a stormy day, the fishermen stay on shore and talk with their friends or do chores around the house rather than brave the elements as larger trawlers are able to do. Women follow the tides out and collect clams on the mud flats, only one example of how intimately their lives are tied to the moon cycle.

Both Jeremy and Jonathan posted some great photos on their blogs of the course.

Here are a couple of photos of the different type of sea kayaking we do on the course from Jonathan:

Crossing from the mainland to Mook Island.

Paddling through the mangroves.

Here are some photos from Jeremy:

Anna, Bang I'et and Pi Toto listening to Bang Hed talk about community forests and mangroves.

Ma' roasts cashews fresh off the tree.

In Thailand, as in much of the world, more time is required to catch fewer and fewer fish.

Alanna Mitchell’s book, Sea Sick: The Global Ocean in Crisis,  lays out in clear language the multiple challenges that are facing the oceans, from oxygen depleted dead zones, to the acidification of the oceans, to the crashing of the global fish stocks. Part travel writing, part investigative reporting, Sea Sick follows Mitchell around the world talking with scientists and seeing the crisis of the oceans first-hand.

We’ve been looking for a good book that we can use on our Coastal course as well as the Islands course. Mitchell’s book is perfect for what we needed — a book with the big picture, and lots of links into the primary literature.  So, for example, while reading about her visit to Halifax and discussions with scientists studying the crisis of global fisheries, we also read the journal articles that those scientists have written (such as Worm, Boris, et. al., “Impacts of Biodiversity Loss on Ocean Ecosystem Services,” Science, Vol. 314, November 2006).

Here are some excerpts (from the book’s page online).

The ocean is built to withstand change. It has layers of safeguards that the atmosphere and the land systems do not, and yet even these are being breached. It is a larger and more serious problem than atmospheric change.

However, we are not hearing much about it, or about the implications for life on the planet–not just human life and civilisation, but life in general. We hear from time to time about overfishing, or about the cities that would flood if the sea level rose, or about coral bleaching, but rarely everything put together…

About 250 million years ago, during the time known as the Great Dying at the end of the Permian period–the biggest mass extinction the world has yet known–the ocean’s oxygen ran out. There are a couple of theories about why this happened, but a leading candidate is that the surface layer warmed up enough and became salty enough to disturb the currents. Currents feed oxygen from the atmosphere into the ocean and move nutrients around. When the oxygen vanished, most life on land and in the sea–more than 90 per cent of the species then alive–died.

The point of the story, [Flannery] said, is that it is clear that the ocean contains the switch of life. Not land, nor the atmosphere. The ocean. And that switch can be flipped off.

We know it’s happened in the past, he told me. We just don’t know the trigger.

As the book makes clear, we may have pulled the trigger without realizing it.

A few good points from the book:

• The ocean produces half the oxygen we breath.  In other words, every other breath comes from the ocean.
• 99 percent of the living space on the planet is the ocean.
• Most of us have a “terrestrial bias” and really mostly think about only the very surface of the ocean (when we think about it at all).
• If all terrestrial life ceased, the life in the oceans would go on.  If life in the oceans ceased,  terrestrial life would also cease.

The book provided the basis for some great discussions.  One of the main things that kept coming up over and over again was the question of WHY.  Why do students grow up in school studying the destruction of the rainforest, and for most of the students, this was the first time they had read about the crisis facing the oceans? Their own experience proved Mitchell’s point of terrestrial bias.

Today, the students are down in Trang, Southern Thailand, camping on the beach and sea kayaking through the mangroves.  The next few days will be spent padding and diving, learning about mangroves, sea grasses and reefs. Tomorrow requires a crossing to Koh Muk, and paying attention to wind, tides and currents will be key. In just over a week, they will paddle down the coast to a small Muslim fishing village, and spend the remainder of the course learning from their host families about the crisis of the oceans Mitchell writes about, and what one small Thai community is doing to help conserve the mangrove and sea grasses, and make a difference in the future of the oceans.

This is a great book. Get it, read it, and pass it on to someone else to read.

Sobering post up by Joseph Romm at Climate Progress focusing on the impact on the oceans of increasing CO2 and warming, looking at a recent study predicting that as ocean “dead zones” expand, they could remain for 1,000-2,000 years. Citing an article by AFP:

“Global warming may create “dead zones” in the ocean that would be devoid of fish and seafood and endure for up to two millennia….

Its authors say deep cuts in the world’s carbon emissions are needed to brake a trend capable of wrecking the marine ecosystem and depriving future generations of the harvest of the seas.”

The problem, of course, is that the oceans have a great deal of inertia in them–once a process is started, it is very hard to slow it down or reverse it.  The key to avoiding this outcome (which would be a catastrophe–as oceans supply a large percentage of the world’s food) requires massive change NOW to slow down and reverse the growing carbon load in the atmosphere. As Romm points out in this and other posts, “geo-engineering” (active interventions to change the climate) is unlikely to work, and carries with it significant risks of unintended consequences.  We are already experimenting on the planet by pumping massive amounts of CO2 and related gasses into the atmosphere–adding other untested (and untestable) interventions seems like a really bad idea.

Every time I read about geo-engineering I’m reminded of the well intentioned but ultimately disastrous  introductions of non-native species into a new area (rabbits in Australia, kudzu in a garden in the US, etc.).  In Thailand you can find huge snails as well as certain types of crabs in the rice fields that were introduced as a cash crop to farmers.  The idea was to sell them as an export item, generating more income for farmers.  Of course, they escaped and are now a major pest. A thorny mimosa tree/shrub (mayaraap) was introduced in Thailand by the Irrigation Department to stabilize the banks of canals.  Now, of course, mayaraap thickly coat the banks of streams, rivers, ponds, lakes, and former rice fields.  To deal with this, the Irrigation Department is considering introducing another non-native species–a small beetle that eats the mayaraap.  Nothing could go wrong with THAT plan…

Geo-engineering? When we still (maybe) have time to mitigate and change behavior so the CO2 doesn’t get there in the first place? While there are lots of small scale ways to draw down carbon (e.g. bio-char, etc.), dumping iron into the ocean or injecting sulfer into the atmosphere (just two current ideas) make me think about beetles. What else is going to happen if we do that?

Good summary of the growing awareness of the issues surrounding oceans at worldchanging.org:

“Simply put, if the oceans crash, we crash, and the signs of impending collapse are everywhere. On the other hand, it’s becoming clearer that new solutions and policies may actually give us the capacity to understand and prevent that crash, if we have the will.”

So what is the future for the Chao Lay kids growing up in the islands?

Certainly we see this in Thailand.  In the years we’ve been going down to the Adang Archapeligo for our Islands Course, as well as the time in Trang with the Coastal Course, we’ve seen fish populations decline, average size of individual species go down, and an overall drop in the health of the reefs.  It can be pretty discouraging.  However, as Alex and Julia point out in their summary article, there is growing awareness of the oceans and their role not just in producing fish but also their role in regulating climate.  This is GREAT news, as while coastal communities have been aware of this, so many people are disconnected from the oceans.

In related news, Andy Revkin has a great post up on the dot.earth blog about how Google is opening up the oceans as it did the land.

“The new version of Google Earth allows users to mouse around under and over the seas, click on video clips of hydrothermal vents, read up on which seafoods are being harvested unsustainably, look at marine dead zones and sanctuaries and the like.”

While this isn’t as good as going out and living with a community dependent on fishing and the mangroves, getting wet and diving a reef, it opens up a whole new world that most people really don’t see or understand–hopefully leading people to care more about the reality of the oceans and their critical role in our future and the health of the planet.

WorldChanging: Oceans Are the New Atmosphere

DotEarth: Can Google’s Oceans Protect the Real Ones?