Doom Less, Do More – The Changing World and Oceanic Health

Posted on by Cara Mico, Assistant Editor

In this ever-changing world there are few things that tell us what the world was like many thousands of years ago. Tree rings, soil samples, fossils, all paint a valuable picture of the prehistoric climate, but few provide more robust historical data than the ice core samples of the deep ice shelves of Antarctica.

The ice itself was, at least for many thousands of years, relatively stable. Although there is less ice now than in the recent past, there is still more than enough to provide an accurate depiction of what Earth’s atmosphere was like before the industrial revolution.

Ice exists in many parts of the world in what is known as the cryosphere, but the oldest and deepest contiguous ice is found in Antarctica. In some cases, ice core samples are drilled in glaciers made of ice almost 100,000 years old. And while the samples can’t give us granular data (meaning it won’t tell you what the weather was like on your birthday 100,000 years ago), it can give you a better understanding of the nature and extent of the variation. And of course the word variation says it all! The climate of present day Earth is highly variable. But Antarctica, for some time, has remained pretty cold, reducing the variation, which is why it is a useful dataset.

There aren’t many organizations that conduct this research. It’s difficult to get to and expensive. All of the equipment is specialized and prone to breaking. Everything necessary for a research study needs to be shipped in during the early summer months. If something goes wrong it might mean the end of that study for some time.

Of the agencies and organizations currently conducting this work, the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, and the National Science Foundation, or NSF, are the most well known and well funded.

Ice core samples provide a great deal of data which is why they have sampled so many cores. They look at the density, distribution, and size of air bubbles to get an understanding of freeze thaw cycles, they look at particulate matter to better understand potential atmospheric concentrations, and they look at isotopes to understand both temperature and CO2 concentrations.

Carbon cycles are complex but not difficult to explain. Carbon is naturally present in the atmosphere, water, and soil in various forms. The cycle refers to the transition of carbon from its gaseous form as either CO2, CO, or a variety of other gasses, to its solid form. Carbon in solid form is the building block of life, meaning every living organism is made of carbon.

Balance is something not common in nature, in fact, nature is constantly evolving with species going into extinction and coming into existence on a regular basis. The balance of carbon shifts when it moves from the air, to the land, to water, and back again. Humans have shifted this balance substantially by taking a long dormant part of this cycle and converting it from a relatively neutral and stable solid form, to a gaseous form via combustion.

Since this is already trending towards a long-winded chemistry lesson without any of the fun beakers or flasks, I’ll spare you the specifics of other greenhouse gasses such as methane, since the principles are largely the same even though the mechanism of action and impact vary.

From nearly every known measure, humans have significantly altered the landscape, but nowhere is this more apparent than in the ocean and adjacent glaciers. The reason we’re discussing these together is because they tell a more complete picture when looked at in parallel.

When glacier melt occurs, water that was previously stored on land enters the ocean, altering the salinity as well as many other metrics. When carbon that was previously stored underground is combusted and enters the atmosphere as CO2, it changes the interaction of the air and the water. The ocean absorbs a great deal of the earth’s CO2, with or without humans. We’ve nearly doubled the concentration of atmospheric CO2 in under a century and this changes the pH of the ocean, as more CO2 is absorbed by ocean water and converted into calcium carbonate, the ability of the ocean to absorb CO2 is reduced, some believe by about 15 percent.

This means that a larger percentage of the CO2 we put into the air stays in the air.

This also means that sea-life that evolved under somewhat stable carbon cycles for eons is suddenly subjected to a triple whammy of rising ocean temperatures, a change in salinity, and a change in pH.

On the Oregon coast we’re seeing this impact directly, and have for years in both the size and abundance of native and farmed oysters. Native oysters have a short window of spawn and require a specific temperature, salinity, and pH for a very narrow window of time to successfully breed. Farmed oysters are somewhat more resilient but also impacted by these changes. While not every year is consistently bad, farmers and shellfish enthusiasts alike are noticing more bad years than good.

We’re also seeing mass die-offs in star fish and other crustaceans. While it’s nearly impossible to point to all of this and say “climate change” since it’s more complex than I’ve outlined here, it’s also obvious that many ecosystems are struggling with resiliency. I will try not to mention that as phytoplankton consume microplastics they die off at higher rates and release more CO2 so there’s that.

The reason I’ve mitigated this here is because in addition to the chemical changes of the environment, we’ve also put a great deal of pollution into the ocean directly in the form of plastics, oil spills, nuclear testing, and just about everything else you pour down your sink. Human waste coupled with changing temperatures is a likely contributor to red tide, essentially acting as a fertilizer. We also do quite a bit of fishing and have built many dams, and have cut down many riparian areas, so a lack of fish in one area might not be explained by climate change alone, but rather a loss of resiliency from a human dominated landscape that doesn’t leave many areas wholly untouched.

In other words it’s complicated! And the Earth is nearly 5 billion years old. That’s a LONG time during which life experienced nearly every climate and atmospheric composition you can imagine.

We might not need to worry about pumping CO2 into the air at rates not seen since the Pliocene if we were to improve freshwater wetland condition, increase the abundance of marine estuaries, and restore forested ecosystems to their natural diversity.

Nature is incredibly resilient after all, if it weren’t, none of us would be here.

The problem lies in that we’ve touched everything all at once to a very large degree and there is no refuge for anything less resilient than a fly or cockroach.

The complexities of ecosystem science are many, as Waldo Leopold said, “Everything is connected to everything else.” This doesn’t, however, mean that we should throw our hands in the air and do nothing, nor does it mean that we should fret over turning off every light bulb. Seek first to understand, then to be understood as the adage goes. While we can’t guarantee that the sixth mass extinction we are witnessing is from the levels of atmospheric CO2 alone (it likely isn’t – remember, the reason we used the CO2 in the first place was for industry, and that industry by nature changed every single system on Earth), we can say for sure that seeking more information and being cautious is almost never a bad thing. If you’re looking for direct actions you can take, plant a tree, or better yet, plant 5000. Recycle, reduce, reuse. But don’t forget that life is short and if we all live our lives without joy it doesn’t matter if we solve the Earth crisis or not.

In the meantime, between now and when you go plant your next tree, feel joy in knowing that there are people doing things like this: