Oceans, Away

It probably didn’t show up on your calendar, but today is World Ocean Day. It’s a day meant to catalyze “collective action for a healthy ocean and a stable climate,” and has been around since 2002 (although the U.N. didn’t officially recognize it until 2008). Its website claims a network of over 2,000 organizations, in 180 countries.

I wish we had more to celebrate.

You'd think that with World Ocean Day that we'd treat them better. Credit: Microsoft Designer

Many have recognized the irony of humans calling our planet “Earth,” when, in fact, 71% of its surface is covered with water. Even more amazing, oceans account for 99% of the biosphere. We come from the ocean, and still owe much of our existence to it.

Unfortunately, these are not good times for oceans, and we’re to blame. The most recent World Ocean Assessment from the U.N. highlights:

• “The ocean matters to everyone, everywhere;
• The ocean is under intensifying stress;
• Climate change is transforming conditions;
• Biodiversity is declining across nearly every marine habitat;
• Pollution is widespread and increasing;
• Ocean food systems are threatened.”

The report concludes: “The coming decade is decisive: without rapid, coordinated global action, ocean health will continue to decline, threatening climate stability, biodiversity resilience, food security, livelihoods and the wellbeing of billions.”

I think about this in light of last month’s announcement by the National Science Foundation that it was “descoping” the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) Major Facility, beginning next week. That’s a $368 million deep-ocean observation system “that delivers real-time data from more than 900 instruments to address critical science questions regarding the world's oceans.” Some 900 instruments will be removed, in both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.

OOI map. Credit: NSF/OOI

Michael England, a spokesman for the National Science Foundation, told Eric Niiler of The New York Times that the decision “aligns with N.S.F.’s wider strategy to have a nimbler approach to prioritizing support for evolving scientific priorities and emerging technologies as well as a deliberate approach to smart life cycle management within its portfolio of research infrastructure.”

In other words, we (the Trump Administration) didn’t invent it, and it relates to climate change, so we don’t want it.

Craig McLean, who was the acting chief scientist at the NOAA during the first Trump term, told Mr. Niiler: “This reflects the further lack of understanding that the current administration has of scientific value and scientific merit. By dismantling such a system, we push the United States back yet again into a rear seat in global scientific leadership.”

Scientists are aghast. Sabrina Speich, an expert in global ocean monitoring at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris and chair of the ocean expert panel of the Global Climate Observing System, told The Guardian: “Ocean heat content is the most robust indicator of climate change we have – not just of what is happening in the ocean, but of the entire climate system. Lose them, and you lose your ability to track not just ocean warming but the climate system as a whole – they are a proxy for variables that become unavailable the moment the observations stop.”  

John P Abraham, professor of engineering at the University of St Thomas, called the move “penny-wise, pound foolish,” adding: “The US government wants to save less than a billion in sensors, which are the eyes and ears of the ocean. We have hundreds of billions in climate costs per year. The cost of the observation system is a fraction of the climate costs from hurricanes and storms that hit the US.”

“Walking away from a $368-million investment in a state-of-the-art system, a feat of engineering already paid for by the American people, is absolutely myopic,” Chris Robbins, the associate director of scientific initiatives for Ocean Conservancy, a nonprofit group, complained to Mr. Niiler.

Democrats in Congress vow to fight the cuts, but lack the votes to do anything. The E.U. said it was stepping up its ocean monitoring efforts, independent of the U.S.’s action, with its OceanEye initiative, but that will be a long term process and won’t immediately offset the U.S. cuts.

Meanwhile, a new study has found that a “cold blob” in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation may suggest big changes ahead: “a further weakening of Atlantic heat transport in future climate change could lead to serious impacts on climate and weather conditions in Europe and other parts of the world.”

Sure doesn’t seem like a great time to lose our ocean monitoring abilities.

Even worse are the Trump Administration’s gung-ho attitude towards deep sea mining. It is well known that the ocean’s floor has lots of valuable minerals, and some mining companies are delirious at the prospect of strip mining them. The NOAA has starting mapping some 30,000 square nautical miles off American Samoa, and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) is investigating several other offshore areas, both with the intent of allowing deep sea mining.

The U.S. may even issue permits for seabeds not owned by the U.S., or any country.

“No one has done commercial-scale deep-sea mining,” said Becca Loomis, a staff attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, ““This would be brand new, and they’re kind of forging ahead. Rushing ahead with this industry is really scary for the ocean, the ocean ecosystem, for people who rely on fisheries.” 

A new review of existing studies found how relatively little we understand about the impacts of such mining, but what little we do know suggest there are large and longstanding impacts on biodiversity.

Just this week, a Greenpeace study found thriving new-to-us ecosystems in the Arctic Mid-Ocean Ridge “We barely understand how these communities function, which environmental factors influence their distribution, or how sensitive they are to human disturbances. Likewise, our discovery of several sponge species that are potentially new to science highlights how little is known about Arctic ecosystems, said Dr Julio A. Diaz, deep-sea researchers, Museum of Evolution at Uppsala University.

“The deep sea mining industry has not yet started to tear up the seabed, and we therefore have the opportunity to stop an environmental disaster before it happens.” said Dr. Sandra Schöttner, Chief Scientist, Greenpeace International.

One can imagine how little the Trump Administration – whose mantra is “drill, baby, drill” – cares about such impacts.

I’m thrilled that there is such a thing as World Ocean Day, but it’s hard to celebrate it in the midst of all that is happening to degrade and disrupt our oceans. I’m quite certain that the oceans will be around long after humans will be, but it’s unfathomable about how much damage we’ll do to them while we are.