Oceans on the Precipice: Scripps Scientist Warns of Mass Extinctions and 'Rise of Slime'

Threats to marine ecosystems from overfishing, pollution and climate change must be addressed to halt downward trends

Scripps Institution of Oceanography/UC San Diego

Human activities are cumulatively driving the health of the world's oceans down a rapid spiral, and only prompt and wholesale changes will slow or perhaps ultimately reverse the catastrophic problems they are facing.

Such is the prognosis of Jeremy Jackson, a professor of oceanography at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, in a bold new assessment of the oceans and their ecological health. Publishing his study in the online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Jackson believes that human impacts are laying the groundwork for mass extinctions in the oceans on par with vast ecological upheavals of the past.

Jeremy Jackson, Scripps Professor of Oceanography

He cites the synergistic effects of habitat destruction, overfishing, ocean warming, increased acidification and massive nutrient runoff as culprits in a grand transformation of once complex ocean ecosystems. Areas that had featured intricate marine food webs with large animals are being converted into simplistic ecosystems dominated by microbes, toxic algal blooms, jellyfish and disease.

Jackson, director of the Scripps Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation, has tagged the ongoing transformation as "the rise of slime." The new paper, "Ecological extinction and evolution in the brave new ocean," is a result of Jackson's presentation last December at a biodiversity and extinction colloquium convened by the National Academy of Sciences.

"The purpose of the talk and the paper is to make clear just how dire the situation is and how rapidly things are getting worse," said Jackson. "It's a lot like the issue of climate change that we had ignored for so long. If anything, the situation in the oceans could be worse because we are so close to the precipice in many ways."

In the assessment, Jackson reviews and synthesizes a range of research studies on marine ecosystem health, and in particular key studies conducted since a seminal 2001 study he led analyzing the impacts of historical overfishing. The new study includes overfishing, but expands to include threats from areas such as nutrient runoff that lead to so-called "dead zones" of low oxygen. He also incorporates increases in ocean warming and acidification resulting from greenhouse gas emissions.

Jackson describes the potently destructive effects when forces combine to degrade ocean health. For example, climate change can exacerbate stresses on the marine environment already brought by overfishing and pollution.

"All of the different kinds of data and methods of analysis point in the same direction of drastic and increasingly rapid degradation of marine ecosystems," Jackson writes in the paper.

During a recent research expedition to Kiritimati, or Christmas Island, Jeremy Jackson and other researchers documented a coral reef overtaken by algae, featuring murky waters and few fish. The researchers say pollution, overfishing, warming waters or some combination of the three are to blame. Photo credit: Jennifer E. Smith

Jackson furthers his analysis by constructing a chart of marine ecosystems and their "endangered" status. Coral reefs, Jackson's primary area of research, are "critically endangered" and among the most threatened ecosystems; also critically endangered are estuaries and coastal seas, threatened by overfishing and runoff; continental shelves are "endangered" due to, among other things, losses of fishes and sharks; and the open ocean ecosystem is listed as "threatened" mainly through losses at the hands of overfishing.

"Just as we say that leatherback turtles are critically endangered, I looked at entire ecosystems as if they were a species," said Jackson. "The reality is that if we want to have coral reefs in the future, we're going to have to behave that way and recognize the magnitude of the response that's necessary to achieve it."

To stop the degradation of the oceans, Jackson identifies overexploitation, pollution and climate change as the three main "drivers" that must be addressed.

"The challenges of bringing these threats under control are enormously complex and will require fundamental changes in fisheries, agricultural practices and the ways we obtain energy for everything we do," he writes.

"So it's not a happy picture and the only way to deal with it is in segments; the only way to keep one's sanity and try to achieve real success is to carve out sectors of the problem that can be addressed in effective terms and get on it as quickly as possible."

The research described in the paper was supported by the William E. and Mary B. Ritter Chair of Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

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Scripps Institution of Oceanography, at UC San Diego, is one of the oldest, largest and most important centers for global science research and graduate training in the world. The National Research Council has ranked Scripps first in faculty quality among oceanography programs nationwide. Now in its second century of discovery, the scientific scope of the institution has grown to include biological, physical, chemical, geological, geophysical and atmospheric studies of the earth as a system. Hundreds of research programs covering a wide range of scientific areas are under way today in 65 countries. The institution has a staff of about 1,300, and annual expenditures of approximately $155 million from federal, state and private sources. Scripps operates one of the largest U.S. academic fleets with four oceanographic research ships and one research platform for worldwide exploration.

European Space Agency : GOCE prepares for shipment to Russia

GOCE in ESA's test facilities

Launching in just two months' time, GOCE – now fully reconfigured for launch in September, is currently being prepared for shipment on 29 July 2008 from ESA's test facilities in the Netherlands to the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northern Russia.

Originally, the Gravity field and steady-state Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE) mission had been scheduled for launch in May 2008, but as a result of precautionary measures taken following a problem with an upper-stage section of a Russian Proton launcher, the launch date was postponed until 10 September 2008. Consequently, the satellite had to be reconfigured for a so-called 'summer launch configuration'.

	Rockot fairing opens three minutes after launch

Since the GOCE gravity mission is designed to fly at a particularly low altitude of just 263 km and at a slight inclination with respect to an exact polar orbit, the satellite goes into the shadow of the Earth during polar nights for 28 minutes 135 days each year.

By going into the Earth’s shadow where no sun hits the satellite, GOCE experiences changes in temperature that could potentially affect measurements. Not knowing exactly when GOCE would launch, the option to choose whether it went into Earth’s shadow, referred to as an ‘eclipse period’, between October and February or between April and August was included in its design.


The choice between these two options is made by either launching into a northward equator crossing at 06:00 or at 18:00. The main difference between the launch times – as seen from the Sun – is that it determines whether the satellite flies clockwise or anticlockwise around the Earth.

Since GOCE will launch in September, the preferred eclipse period is April to August because it allows unaffected commissioning and science operations until April next year.

GOCE in orbit

Over the last two months the satellite has been successfully reconfigured and fully tested and is now in the process of being prepared for its journey from ESA-ESTEC to the launch site in Russia.

On the morning of 29 July a container holding the GOCE satellite, along with six other containers carrying a whole host of support equipment, will be loaded onto trucks and taken to Schiphol Airport near Amsterdam in the Netherlands.

Once aboard an Antonov cargo aircraft, the shipment will be flown to Arkhangelsk, Russia, where the container will be transferred to a train for the rest of the journey to the Plesetsk Cosmodrome. Additional support equipment is being transported by ship to the launch site on 21 July from Antwerp, Belgium.

After the satellite is unpacked, a final check will be carried out before being mounted onto its Rockot launch vehicle 13 days prior to launch.

	The Earth's gravity field (geoid) as it will be seen by GOCE

Once launched and commissioned, GOCE will map global variations in the gravity field with extreme detail and accuracy. This will result in a unique model of the geoid, which is the surface of equal gravitational potential defined by the gravity field – crucial for deriving accurate measurements of ocean circulation and sea-level change, both of which are affected by climate change.

GOCE-derived data is also much needed to understand more about processes occurring inside the Earth and for use in practical applications such as surveying and levelling.

American Meteorological Society : Fully updated climate change book by Scripps researcher now available from AMS

A comprehensive and up-to-date account of climate change science by Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego climate scientist Richard Somerville is now available from the American Meteorological Society.

Twelve years after its initial publication, The Forgiving Air: Understanding Environmental Change updates the critical issue of climate change with the latest science including the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports. The book weaves together complex topics such as the greenhouse effect, acid rain, air pollution and the ozone hole in an easy-to-understand story. Somerville was a coordinating lead author in Working Group I, which produced a key portion of the IPCC's 2007 Fourth Assessment Report.

Somerville, a distinguished professor emeritus at Scripps, was also an organizer of the 2007 Bali Climate Declaration by Scientists, an effort by climate scientists to inject some quantitative scientific substance into United Nations climate negotiations that took place in Indonesia in December 2007.

"Over the 20-year history of the IPCC, both the observational evidence for a warming world and the scientific understanding of the causes of warming have strengthened remarkably," notes Somerville in the preface to the second edition. "Today, climate science is able to inform governments, corporations, the media, and the global public, as humankind attempts to formulate policies in response to the prospect of future climate change."

Somerville joined Scripps as a professor in 1979. He is a theoretical meteorologist whose major research interests are the greenhouse effect and global climate change. He is a specialist in computer modeling of the climate system. His latest research has focused on the role of clouds, cloud-radiation interactions, and cloud feedbacks in climate.

Somerville continues to work with business, government and the public to inform them about important recent research in the science of climate change.

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With more than 12,000 members, the AMS is the nation's leading professional soci¬ety for those involved in the atmospheric and related sciences. The book costs $16 for AMS members and $22 for non-members. It is available directly from the AMS, which takes orders via telephone at (617) 227-2426 x 686 or online at amsorder@ametsoc.org For a complete list of books available from the Society see http://www.ametsoc.org/pubs/books/

University of Washington : Scientists break record by finding northernmost hydrothermal vent field

The top three feet of a chimney nearly 40 feet tall are visible as the arm of a remotely operated vehicle reaches in to sample fluids. The vent is part...

Well inside the Arctic Circle, scientists have found black smoker vents farther north than anyone has ever seen before. The cluster of five vents – one towering nearly four stories in height – are venting water as hot as 570 F.

Dissolved sulfide minerals that solidify when vent water hits the icy cold of the deep sea have, over the years, accumulated around the vent field in what is one of the most massive hydrothermal sulfide deposits ever found on the seafloor, according to Marvin Lilley, a University of Washington oceanographer. He's a member of an expedition led by Rolf Pedersen, a geologist with the University of Bergen's Centre for Geobiology, aboard the research vessel G.O. Sars.

The vents are located at 73 degrees north on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge between Greenland and Norway. That's more than 120 miles from the previous northernmost vents found during a 2005 expedition, also led by Pedersen. Other scientists have detected plumes of water from hydrothermal vents even farther north but have been unable to find the vent fields on the seafloor to image and sample them.

In recent years scientists have been interested in knowing how far north vigorous venting extends. That's because the ridges where such fields form are so stable up north, usually subject only to what scientists term "ultra-slow" spreading. That's where tectonic forces are pulling the seafloor apart at a rate as little as 6/10th of an inch in a year. This compares to lower latitudes where spreading can be up to eight times that amount, and fields of hydrothermal vents are much more common.

"We hadn't expected a lot of active venting on ultra-slow spreading ridges," Lilley said.

The active chimneys in the new field are mostly black and covered with white mats of bacteria feasting on the minerals emitted by the vents. Older chimneys are mottled red as a result of iron oxidization. All are the result of seawater seeping into the seafloor, coming near fiery magma and picking up heat and minerals until the water vents back into the ocean. The same process created the huge mound of sulfide minerals on which the vents sit. That deposit is about 825 feet in diameter at its base and about 300 feet across on the top and might turn out to be the largest such deposit seen on the seafloor, Lilley said. Additional mapping is needed.

"Given the massive sulfide deposit, the vent field must surely have been active for many thousands of years," he said.

The field has been named Loki's Castle partly because the small chimneys at the site looked like a fantasy castle to the scientists. The Loki part refers to a Norwegian god renowned for trickery. A University of Bergen press release about the discovery said Loki "was an appropriate name for a field that was so difficult to locate."

Indeed this summer's expedition and the pinpointing of the location of the vents earlier this month follows nearly a decade of research. Finding the actual field involved extensive mapping. It also meant sampling to detect warm water and using optical sensors lowered in the ocean to determine the chemistry, both parts that involved Lilley. He said a key sensor was one developed by Ko-ichi Nakamura of the National Institute of Advanced Science and Technology, Japan, that detects reduced chemicals that are in the water as a result of having been processed through a hydrothermal vent.

A remotely operated vehicle was used to finally find the vents. The difficulties of the task are described in an expedition Web diary, see "Day 17: And then there were vents" at http://www.geobio.uib.no/View.aspx?mid=1062&itemid=90&pageid=1093&moduledefid=71.

The area around the vents was alive with microorganisms and animals. Preliminary observations suggest that the ecosystem around these Arctic vents is diverse and appears to be unique, unlike the vent communities observed elsewhere, the University of Bergen press release said. The expedition included 25 participants from five countries.

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For more information (note both contacts are at sea until July 27)

Lilley, lilley@u.washington.edu, arrives back in Seattle July 30
Pedersen, rolf.pedersen@geo.uib.no

Universidad de Granada : Spanish engineers design a new model of slope marine dock

UGR News Marine docks construction has traditionally encountered problems derived from swell-produced breking, especially in the event of great storms. The economic spending to repair the damage is very high and it affects ports, promenades or beaches. The most recent case in Spain was the storm of March 2008, which caused considerable material damage in the coasts of the Bay of Biscay.

A new design will permit to build slope marine docks with less risk of damage, in order to reduce the costs of construction, maintenance and upkeep of such maritime structures.

"We have designated this new structure ‘S", says María Clavero Gilabert, a member of the Group of Dynamics of Environmental Flows in the Andalusian Centre for Environmetal Studies (CEAMA-University of Granada, Spain), supervised by Dr. Miguel Losada Rodríguez.

According to the researcher, this study "is focused on the optimization of the typology of slope marine docks in order to lessen their main damage, the extraction of pieces from the external layer (loss of the blocks which Project the dock against swell).

At present, these structures have been designed in such a way that there may be serious damage in case swell grows stronger than that predicted in the design. Thanks to the results of this work, it is possible to design slope docks which remain absolutely steady up to the design swell and, in case of stronger swell, it i sable to adapt and therefore they do not suffer this problem". It is possible for docks to reduce swell energy without breaking, with the consequent benefit for the areas to be protected.

Swell Canal
The research work to improve maritime structures has been developed from the tests carried out in the Swell Canal of the CEAMA. It was necessary to "construct slope docks to scale with homogeneous pieces of concrete cubes and carry out tests with incident swells and growing waves, so that the dock became distorted until a balance or stable profile for such wave height was reached", says María Clavero.

The Swell-Current Canal of the CEAMA, which allows to carry out experiments on a large scale, is one of the most important in Spain; it is 23 metres long, cashiers are one meter high and it is 0.65 metres wide. This "laboratory" has been used quite often and allows to carry out the tests of the research groups specialized in Mechanics of Structures and Hydraulic Engineering. Such tests have been applied to research and technological development agreements with the port authorities of Gijón, the Bay of Cadiz, Almería-Motril, the State Coastal Office of the Spanish Ministry of the Environment, companies such as Consultoría Ibérica de Estudios e Ingeniería S.A, Dragados S.A. or EGMASA, etc.
The study by Clavero Gilabert has been funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science and has been carried out in the last five years. Different papers in International conferences have been fruit of this research; one might mention the 29th and 30th International Conference on Coastal Engineering held in Lisbon -2004- and San Diego -2006-, respectively).

DOE/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory study find Ocean temperatures and sea level increases 50 percent higher than previously estimated

LIVERMORE, Calif. - New research suggests that ocean temperature and associated sea level increases between 1961 and 2003 were 50 percent larger than estimated in the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report.
The results are reported in the June 19 edition of the journal Nature. An international team of researchers, including Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory climate scientist Peter Gleckler, compared climate models with improved observations that show sea levels rose by 1.5 millimeters per year in the period from 1961-2003. That equates to an approximately 2_-inch increase in ocean levels in a 42-year span.
The ocean warming and thermal expansion rates are more than 50 percent larger than previous estimates for the upper 300 meters of oceans.
The research corrected for small but systematic biases recently discovered in the global ocean observing system, and uses statistical techniques that "infill" information in data-sparse regions. The results increase scientists' confidence in ocean observations and further demonstrate that climate models simulate ocean temperature variability more realistically than previously thought.
"This is important for the climate modeling community because it demonstrates that the climate models used for assessing sea-level rise and ocean warming tie in closely with the observed results," Gleckler said.
Climate model data were analyzed from 13 different modeling groups. All model data were obtained from the WCRP CMIP3 multi-model dataset archived at the LLNL's Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison (PCMDI)
Although observations and models confirm that recent warming is greatest in the upper ocean, there are widespread observations of warming deeper than 700 meters.
Results were compared with recent estimates of other contributions to sea-level rise including glaciers, ice caps, Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, and thermal expansion changes in the deep ocean. When these independent lines of evidence are examined collectively, the story is more consistent than found in earlier studies
The oceans store more than 90 percent of the heat in the Earth's climate system and act as a temporary buffer against the effects of climate change. The ocean warming and thermal expansion rates are 50 percent larger than previous estimates for the upper 700 meters of oceans, and greater than that for the upper 300 meters.
"This is just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak," Gleckler said. "Our ability to quantify structural uncertainties in observationally based estimates is critically important. This study represents important progress."
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The team involved researchers from the Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research (CSIRO), the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre and LLNL.
Founded in 1952, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is a national security laboratory, with a mission to ensure national security and apply science and technology to the important issues of our time. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is managed by Lawrence Livermore National Security, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration.

University of Wisconsin-Madison research : Ebb and flow of the sea drives world's big extinction events

MADISON - If you are curious about Earth's periodic mass extinction events such as the sudden demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, you might consider crashing asteroids and sky-darkening super volcanoes as culprits.
But a new study, published online today (June 15, 2008) in the journal Nature, suggests that it is the ocean, and in particular the epic ebbs and flows of sea level and sediment over the course of geologic time, that is the primary cause of the world's periodic mass extinctions during the past 500[sc1] million years.
"The expansions and contractions of those environments have pretty profound effects on life on Earth," says Shanan Peters, a University of Wisconsin-Madison assistant professor of geology and geophysics and the author of the new Nature report.
In short, according to Peters, changes in ocean environments related to sea level exert a driving influence on rates of extinction, which animals and plants survive or vanish, and generally determine the composition of life in the oceans.
Since the advent of life on Earth 3.5 billion years ago, scientists think there may have been as many as 23 mass extinction events, many involving simple forms of life such as single-celled microorganisms. During the past 540 million years, there have been five well-documented mass extinctions, primarily of marine plants and animals, with as many as 75-95 percent of species lost.
For the most part, scientists have been unable to pin down the causes of such dramatic events. In the case of the demise of the dinosaurs, scientists have a smoking gun, an impact crater that suggests dinosaurs were wiped out as the result of a large asteroid crashing into the planet. But the causes of other mass extinction events have been murky, at best.
"Paleontologists have been chipping away at the causes of mass extinctions for almost 60 years," e[sc2]xplains Peters, whose work was supported by the National Science Foundation. "Impacts, for the most part, aren't associated with most extinctions. There have also been studies of volcanism, and some eruptions correspond to extinction, but many do not."
Arnold I. Miller, a paleobiologist and professor of geology at the University of Cincinnati, says the new study is striking because it establishes a clear relationship between the tempo of mass extinction events and changes in sea level and sediment: "Over the years, researchers have become fairly dismissive of the idea that marine mass extinctions like the great extinction of the Late Permian might be linked to sea-level declines, even though these declines are known to have occurred many times throughout the history of life. The clear relationship this study documents will motivate many to rethink their previous views."
Peters measured two principal types of marine shelf environments preserved in the rock record, one where sediments are derived from erosion of land and the other composed primarily of calcium carbonate, which is produced in-place by shelled organisms and by chemical processes. "The physical differences between (these two types) of marine environments have important biological consequences," Peters explains, noting differences in sediment stability, temperature, and the availability of nutrients and sunlight.
In the course of hundreds of millions of years, the world's oceans have expanded and contracted in response to the shifting of the Earth's tectonic plates and to changes in climate. There were periods of the planet's history when vast areas of the continents were flooded by shallow seas, such as the shark- and mosasaur-infested seaway that neatly split North America during the age of the dinosaurs.
As those epicontinental seas drained, animals such as mosasaurs and giant sharks went extinct, and conditions on the marine shelves where life exhibited its greatest diversity in the form of things like clams and snails changed as well.
The new Wisconsin study, Peters says, does not preclude other influences on extinction such as physical events like volcanic eruptions or killer asteroids, or biological influences such as disease and competition among species. But what it does do, he argues, is provide a common link to mass extinction events over a significant stretch of Earth history.
"The major mass extinctions tend to be treated in isolation (by scientists)," Peters says. "This work links them and smaller events in terms of a forcing mechanism, and it also tells us something about who survives and who doesn't across these boundaries. These results argue for a substantial fraction of change in extinction rates being controlled by just one environmental parameter."
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- Terry Devitt, (608) 262-8282, trdevitt@wisc.edu
[sc1]The study starts in the Ordovician [sc2]100 years would refer to larger-scale changes in faunal composition