Often when going to the beach the common complaint is that the ocean is too cold. They appear to be warming up a bit. The upper layer of Earth’s ocean has warmed since 1993, indicating a strong climate change signal, according to a new international study co-authored by oceanographer Josh Willis of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. The energy stored is enough to power nearly 500 100-watt light bulbs for each of the roughly 6.7 billion people on the planet.

“We are seeing the global ocean store more heat than it gives off,” said John Lyman, an oceanographer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Joint Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research, who led the study that analyzed nine different estimates of heat content in the upper ocean from 1993 to 2008.

The team combined the estimates to assess the size and certainty of growing heat storage in the ocean. Their findings will be published in the May 20 edition of the journal Nature. The scientists are from NASA, NOAA, the Met Office Hadley Center in the United Kingdom, the University of Hamburg in Germany and the Meteorological Research Institute in Japan.

“The ocean is the biggest reservoir for heat in the climate system,” said Willis. “So as the planet warms, we’re finding that 80 to 90 percent of the increased heat ends up in the ocean.”

A warming ocean is a direct cause of global sea level rise, since seawater expands and takes up more space as it heats up. The scientists say that this expansion accounts for about one-third to one-half of global sea level rise.

Combining multiple estimates of heat in the upper ocean — from the surface to about 610 meters (2,000 feet) down — the team found a strong multi-year warming trend throughout the world’s ocean. According to measurements by an array of autonomous free floating ocean floats called Argo, as well as by earlier devices called expendable bathythermographs, or XBTs, that were dropped from ships to obtain temperature data, ocean heat content has increased over the last 16 years.

The team notes that there are still some uncertainties and some biases.

Most people, when hearing or reading about a warm up of the world ocean, would naturally ask:  How much?  But to scientists who study phenomena like this, the problem is more complex. While they use ocean temperature readings taken from around the globe to conduct their studies on ocean warming, these scientists are interested in learning about the heat content of the world ocean’s enormous mass of water. Heat content is a measure of the heat energy imparted to a body such as a continent or the ocean. Scientists measure heat content in energy units known as joules.

Beginning in the 1970s, scientists at NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey, started computing the annual cycle of ocean heat content. From the outset, scientists in the climate modeling community showed significant interest in the results of this work as a way to validate their general circulation models of ocean atmosphere interactions.

Article by Andy Soos appearing courtesy ENN

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For almost a month, BP monitored oil and natural gas gushing from the broken riser and blow-out preventer with remote operated vehicles (ROVs). And for almost a month, they kept all of that video to entirely to themselves. But that’s about to change.

In the hours and days immediately following the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon offshore drill rig in the Gulf of Mexico, the federal response was centered on firefighting, search and rescue. For nearly three days, although the rig was burning, the wellhead and riser assembly were still in tact and there was no leaking oil to speak of. And then, the worst-case scenario happened:  the Deepwater Horizon sank.

First reports were that the “only” thing leaking was the 700,000 gallons of diesel fuel from the Deepwater Horizon rig. But then a leak was found in the crumpled, broken riser; and another one at the end of the drill pipe; and yet another at the blowout preventer. All in all, BP was saying that an estimated 1,000 barrels of oil per day was leaking from those three points. That estimate was then bumped up to 5,000 barrels per day.

“We were comfortable with the estimate that was given, the 5,000 barrel per day estimate,” U.S Coast Guard Rear Admiral Mary Landry. Landry, the Federal On-Scene Coordinator for Unified Area Command, Deepwater Horizon Response said on a conference call on Monday.

“It’s only an estimate. I was comfortable with working from that. Did I think it was exact? No. I’ve never trusted that. I’ve never personally trusted that as an exact number,” said Landry.

“And the truth of the matter is we’ve always had to have in the back of our mind that it could be much worse… it could be 55,000 barrels per day, which is an extraordinary amount which would have tremendous impact.”

Seeing the leak

Bowing to public and media pressure, BP released two short video clips of oil and gas gushing from the broken riser pipe. Using those videos, scientists specializing in modeling liquid dynamics with video imagery have estimated the leak to be producing 5 to 10 times the volume of oil and gas as BP’s original estimates.

“I don’t see any scenario under which their estimates are accurate,” Steve Wereley, associate professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University told the House Energy and Environment Subcommittee.

But the videos were not entirely satisfactory for many. They were short, of fair quality and one could conceivably argue hand-selected because they displayed some particularly favorable (in BP’s eyes) characteristics, like a more favorable gas-to-oil ratio.

Congressman Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Senator Bill Nelson of Florida continued to press BP for more access to the video stream of the two remaining oil leaks and BP finally released three and half minutes of video. Still not satisfied, Rep. Markey demanded BP produce the real-time feed of the video, even saying he would host it on the sub-committee’s website .

“BP is going to have to pay for the cleanup of this spill and the long-term damage. Hosting this video on our website is the only freebie they’re going to get,” Markey said.

“This may be BP’s footage, but it’s America’s ocean. Now anyone will be able to see the real-time effects the BP spill is having on our ocean,” said Markey.

By the end of the hearing yesterday, BP officials agreed to provide the live streaming video of the subsea oil and gas leaks. And today, when the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming began streaming live video of the leak, overwhelming interest crashed the website, and as I write this, it is still not back online.

See Video below:

Article by Timothy B. Hurst appearing courtesy Celsias

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A music video released last week as part of Earth Day celebrations looks at consumer culutre and the very real effect it is having on our oceans, as seen in the Pacific Ocean garbage patch.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a Texas-sized vortex of marine litter consisting of pelagic plastics, chemical sludge, and other debris in the Northern Pacific ocean.

Musician Peter Buffet uses his song to urge people to change their wasteful habits, and in turn, lessen the effects of plastic waste products on the planet.

The video, released in conjunction with DoSomething.org, is shown below:

Article appearing courtesy Celsias.

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To date not a single offshore wind turbine been built in the United States. Meanwhile Europe, China and Japan are far along in developing a water-based wind power industry. All one needs is a strong and steady wind as well as a relatively easy way to connect o the power grid so as to transmit the power gained from the wind. Most people think of wind power from various land based operations. However, it can be done by basing the wind turbine in the sea.

A wind farm is a group of wind turbines in the same location used for production of electric power. Individual turbines are interconnected with a medium voltage power collection system and communications network. At a substation, this medium voltage electrical current is increased in voltage with a transformer for connection to the high voltage transmission system.

Near shore turbine installations are on land within 5 miles of a shoreline or on water within ten miles. These areas are good sites for turbine installation, because of wind produced by convection due to differential heating of land and sea each day. Wind speeds in these zones share the characteristics of both onshore and offshore wind, depending on the prevailing wind direction.

Offshore wind turbines are less obtrusive than turbines on land, as their apparent size and noise is mitigated by distance. Because water has less surface roughness than land (especially deeper water), the average wind speed is usually considerably higher over open water.

Spain, Denmark, and Germany are Europe’s main wind energy producers. A large wind farm may consist of a few dozen to several hundred individual wind turbines, and cover an extended area of hundreds of square miles, but the land between the turbines may be used for agricultural or other purposes. A wind farm may be located off-shore to take advantage of strong winds blowing over the surface of an ocean or lake.

The United States is behind in developing sea based wind farms for many reasons: economic and regulatory uncertainties, local opposition (not in my backyard), and even the relative bounty of cheaper land based wind power resources have all conspired to slow any drive to develop wind power resources on the sea.

One of the proposed projects is the Long Island-New York City Offshore Wind Project. The proposed project would be located in the Atlantic Ocean, approximately 13 nautical miles off the Rockaway Peninsula. It would likely be designed for 350 megawatts of generation, with the ability to expand it to 700 megawatts, giving it the potential to be the largest offshore wind project in the country.

The Cape Wind project would lie in the Nantucket Sound off New England. It has been debated for nine years. Some believed the proposed wind farm would cause visual harm to historic sites.

The beleaguered Cape Wind project, which has been struggling to overcome these obstacles for the better part of a decade and now awaits a decision from the Interior Department, is seen as a bellwether for the industry.

Canada may end up with the first North American sea based wind farm.

“Canada is actually in a pretty good place right now,” said Matthew Kaplan, a senior analyst with Emerging Energy Research, a market research firm based in Cambridge, Mass. Mr. Kaplan pointed to the generous incentives for renewable energy development that provincial leaders in Ontario put in place last fall.

This month the Ontario Power Authority announced that it had, in just a few months after introducing the increased incentives, awarded contracts worth $8 billion for development of some 2,500 megawatts of new renewable energy projects — or roughly the capacity of two midsized nuclear power plants.  Among the beneficiaries is Windstream Energy, which plans to build a 300-megawatt wind facility on about 48,000 acres of shallow water near Wolfe Island (Great Lakes region).

The Wall Street Journal noted last week that both sides of the Great Lakes are ripe for wind power development — but whether Windstream, Cape Wind or some other developer will prove to be the first to get an offshore project up and running on this continent remains anybody’s guess.

None of these projects are going to be running soon.

For further information: http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/26/who-will-build-the-first-offshore-wind-farm-in-north-america/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Article by Andy Soos appearing courtesy Environmental News Network.

photo: phault

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U.S. researchers have developed broadband acoustic systems that they say will improve the ability to count and classify fish and zooplankton, an advance they liken to jumping from black and white television to high-definition TV.

While oceanographers have long used acoustic measurements to determine what lies under the sea, existing technologies use sound waves that measure only one or a few frequencies, producing data that can be ambiguous and open to different interpretations, particularly for small fish and zooplankton.

Two new systems developed by researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution measure sound over a continuous range of frequencies, producing a broadband acoustic spectrum.

Since the acoustic action for most fish occurs at low frequencies, many current echosounders miss their signal, said Tim Stanton, author of a study published in the International Council for Exploration of the Sea.

The new broadband system allows researchers to distinguish between fish and other organisms, and identify the size and densities of fish.

One of the systems was developed to find fish, while the other was developed to distinguish zooplankton from underwater turbulence.

Article appearing courtesy Yale Environment 360.

photo: World Resources Institute Staff

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The Obama administration is proposing to open vast areas of open water along the Atlantic coast, in the Gulf of Mexico, and off the northern coast of Alaska to oil and natural gas drilling.

The proposal would end a longtime moratorium on drilling from Delaware to central Florida and would affect nearly 167 million acres of ocean and open 24 million acres in the eastern Gulf to development.

It would also authorize steps toward determining how much oil and natural gas lies off the coast of the Middle Atlantic and Southern states.

While the dramatic policy shift may gain some Republican support for the administration’s energy and climate initiatives, it is expected to alienate many environmental groups and Democrats who oppose expanded offshore drilling because of potential environmental impacts.

Under the terms of the proposal, Bristol Bay in southwestern Alaska would remain protected, but almost 130 million acres of ocean in the Arctic north of Alaska would be opened for oil exploration and development.

Article appearing courtesy Yale Environment 360.

photo: dans le grand bleu

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There is a cascade failure going on in the world’s oceans that promises nothing but trouble in the future, and the problem stems in part from agricultural practices developed over the last half-decade aimed at growing more food on the same amount of land to feed rising populations.

A cascade failure is the progressive collapse of an integral system. Many scientists also call them negative feedback loops, in that unfortunate situations reinforce one another, precipitating eventual and sometimes complete failure.

The agricultural practices relate to “factory farming,” in which farmers grow crops using more and more chemical fertilizers, specifically nitrogen and phosphorus, which are the first two ingredients (chemical symbols N and P) listed on any container or bag of fertilizer. The last is potassium, or K.

But farmers aren’t the only culprits. Lawn enthusiasts add to the problem with their massive applications of fertilizer designed to maintain a species of plant that doesn’t provide either food or habitat, and is grown merely to add prestige. And groundskeepers at parks and large corporate headquarters are equally guilty. In fact, a whole generation needs to rethink its addiction to lawns.

Whoever is guilty of applying the fertilizer, these megadoses are eventually washed off the fields and lawns and into waterways. From there, they migrate to the nearest large bodies of water, where they spark such tremendous and unnatural growth in aquatic plants that the result is eutrophication , or lack of oxygen in the water as bacteria act to reduce the sheer mass of dying organic matter.

One of these aquatic growths is algae, or phytoplankton. Moderate algal growth can produce higher fish yields and actually benefit lakes and oceans, but over-stimulation leads to a whole host of problems whose integral relationship to one another threatens not only aquatic but human life.

A classic example would be the Baltic Sea, where phytoplankton are raging out of control. The Baltic Sea is, as a result, home to seven out of ten of the world’s largest “dead zones,” aquatic areas where nothing survives.

One of the other three is the Gulf of Mexico, where a 2008 dead zone the size of Massachusetts is expected to grow in future years thanks to the U.S. government’s biofuel mandate. Most of the crops for biofuel are grown along the Mississippi River, which drains directly into this dead zone.

In the Baltic, as elsewhere, overfishing has exacerbated the problem. Fish feed on smaller aquatic organisms, which themselves feed on the algae. Take the fish out of the equation, and the balance is lost. It’s very much like removing the wolves that keep down the deer population in order to protect the sheep, and it doesn’t work in the ocean any better than it works on land.

Once the algal blooms begin to thrive, they block sunlight to deeper water and begin to kill off seaweeds and other aquatic plants which are home to fish species. The dying plants then consume more oxygen as bacteria consume them. And, as the seaweeds die, the few remaining fish and shellfish species move away, deprived of habitat.

This is a classic example of a negative feedback loop, and it is reinforced by every meal of fish, every instance of Scotts lawn fertilizer, and every ear of corn grown with a little help from Cargill or Dow, to name just two multinational fertilizer manufacturers.

Another example is occurring in the Pacific Northwest , along the West Coast of the United States, where — in Washington State, Oregon, and even Northern California — piles of Dungeness crab shells on the ocean floor mark areas of severe eutrophication well within sight of land.

Elsewhere along the Pacific shoreline, bird deaths – ranging from pelicans to sea ducks – predict a failure in the natural world that can’t help but reverberate among the planet’s prime predator, man.

These areas of eutrophication have always been present, but their spread – from one or two areas to miles of coastal waters – indicates a larger problem that is likely about to overwhelm not only the fishing industry and tourism but the existence of oceans as living entities.

As Oregon State University ocean sciences professor Jack Barth notes, the once-scarce areas of low oxygen have become the “new normal”, with old areas repeating and new areas cropping up every year. In many of these areas, oxygen levels are 30 percent lower than they were a mere half-decade ago.

Not all algal blooms are harmful or noxious, of course. But those which occur in response to eutrophication do seem to be, and these – known as HABs, or harmful algal blooms – include pseudo-nitzschia producing algae, which deliver a neurotoxin called domoic acid that can kill humans, birds and aquatic mammals that eat the affected shellfish; golden algae, which under certain conditions produce toxins that cause massive fish and bivalve (clams, mussels, oysters) kills; brown tides, which are not toxic in themselves but create aquatic conditions that can kill fish larvae; red tides, which produce brevetoxins that can affect breathing and sometimes trigger fatal, respiratory illnesses in humans; and blue-green algae, or cyanobacteria, which can form dense colonies that cause water to smell and become toxic to fish, pets and humans.

This last, which has spread from Texas to Minnesota, has led to livestock deaths in the former. In the latter, where having a lake home is a sign of prestige, many homeowners have been forced to sell at a loss to get away from once-pristine lakes so smelly and toxic that dozens of pet dogs have been killed drinking the water.

Lower oxygen levels in oceans are very attractive to one species; jellyfish, and these odd creatures with their many tentacles and poisonous sting thrive under such conditions. In fact, jellyfish have few predators except man, and those few (tuna, sharks, swordfish, a carnivorous coral , one species of Pacific salmon and the leatherback turtle) are all at great risk of extinction because of eutrophication and its related conditions, pollution, overfishing and climate change.

As one of the most prolific species in the ocean, and certainly one with a long history (the species has been around since the Cambrian), jellyfish will probably take over the oceans if things continue as they have been going since the 1960s. This is good news for the Japanese, Chinese and other Oriental cultures who regard the slimy beast as a delicacy.

For the rest of us, jellyfish are an acquired taste, and one we had better acquire if we want to keep eating seafood. Either that, or we can support legislation that, in the U.S. at least, promises some relief through research, monitoring and rule-making regarding the Great Lakes and both coasts.

Article by Jeanne Roberts appearing courtesy Celsias.

photo: iansand

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A study of the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the world’s oceans from 1765 to the present shows that as humanity pumps more CO2 into the atmosphere, the capacity of the world’s oceans to continue absorbing carbon appears to be decreasing.

Researchers from Columbia University and NASA estimate that since 2000, the proportion of fossil-fuel emissions absorbed by the oceans may have declined by as much as 10 percent. In effect, researchers say that industrial activity has been producing so much C02 since 1950 that the oceans are slowly becoming saturated with the gas.

“The more carbon dioxide you put in, the more acidic the ocean becomes, reducing its ability to hold CO2,” said lead researcher Samar Khatiwala, an oceanographer at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

The study, published in the journal Nature, estimated that the oceans currently hold about 150 tons of industrial carbon — a third more than in the 1990s.

The researchers used data on ocean chemistry, salinity, temperature, and other measures to calculate the amount of industrial carbon in the ocean for the past 245 years.

The study showed that the land may now being absorbing more carbon than it is producing, perhaps because higher atmospheric CO2 levels are increasing the rate of photosynthesis.

Article appearing courtesy of Yale Environment 360

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Scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have recommended dramatically scaling back oil drilling plans off U.S. coasts and have proposed a ban on oil and gas exploration in the Arctic until oil companies significantly improve their ability to prevent and clean up oil spills.

The non-binding recommendations to U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar represent a stark reversal from the pro-drilling policies of the Bush administration; the new administrator of NOAA, Jane Lubchenco, is an oceanographer who has vowed to restore science to federal environmental policy.

The NOAA scientists recommended excluding large tracts of coastline off Alaska, the Atlantic seaboard, the Gulf of Mexico, and California from a proposed 2010 to 2015 drilling plan that had been pushed by the Bush administration.

The scientists said the previous plan understated the risks that oil exploitation posed to marine life and coastlines. In recommending the temporary Arctic drilling ban, the scientists expressed concern about the impact of potential oil spills on commercial and subsistence fisheries in the North Aleutian Basin and Chukchi Sea.

In the video below, NOAA administrator Jane Lubchenco talks about how public attitudes toward climate change are shifting. She spoke at the conference of the Society of Environmental Journalists last weekend.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Article appearing courtesy of Yale Environment 360.

[photo credit: Flickr]

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A little two-man submarine in Lake Tahoe, California, is searching for jobs under the water.

What’s down there? A nonprofit called the Undersea Voyager Project is getting ready to launch a five-year mission in 2011 to look for ideas on how to restore endangered bodies of water around the world, USA Today reports.

The one problem with water issues is that it’s hard for people to be concerned about what they can’t see.

Only 1 percent of the water column and 3 percent of the ocean floor has been explored on Planet Earth, says the group, led by Scott Cassell.

Project leaders hopes the sub’s explorations will attract attention on pollution and overfishing.

In Lake Tahoe, they’re looking at beds of invading clams, USA Today says.

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