State of the Oceans — Log 70
YOUR WEEKLY BRIEFING FROM PARLEY
This image by the United States Navy, header image from Wikimedia Commons/Kris Krüg
OIL SPILLS
In 2010, an oil rig explosion killed eleven workers and sent over 206 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. BP’s Deep Water Horizon Oil Spill continued non-stop for eighty-seven days, and will go down as one of the most devastating environmental disasters in U.S. history – but according to a new study it was even worse than we thought.
At the time of the accident, experts mainly relied on satellite imagery to track the oil’s spread. But the latest research – which draws on advanced computer models and observations from the field – finds that the spill covered an area 30% larger than previously estimated. Along with 88,522 square miles of sea, dangerous concentrations of oil likely reached the Florida Keys, Tampa, and parts of Florida’s east coast.
The silver lining is that the scientists behind this work have developed a method to more accurately track ‘invisible oil’ beneath the water’s surface, which satellites alone cannot detect. “Eventually there will be another oil spill like that,” one author said, “The less uncertainty you have about where the oil will go, the better the response will be.”
FISHERIES
Good news: global fish populations might be healthier than experts thought. According to a recent study which analyzed 49% of all landings between 1990 and 2016, fisheries are generally steady and maybe even growing wherever intensive management occurs. “There’s just this narrative that fish stocks are declining around the world [and that] fisheries management is failing,” said the paper’s lead author, “They’re certainly declining in some places, but in much of the world, they’re stable or increasing, and fisheries management is working.” While this research does not account for the data-poor half of the globe’s fisheries – which tend to be overexploited – this paper demonstrates that existing conservation strategies work: “We don’t need new solutions. We simply need to apply fisheries management.”
CLIMATE CHANGE
For one day last week, Antarctica and Los Angeles experienced the same weather. On the northern tip of the Antarctica Peninsula, an Argentine-led research station called Esperanza has been tracking temperature since 1961. Last Thursday, scientists there measured a new record high for the polar continent: 64.9°F or 18.2°C. The previous record (63.5°F) was set in March of 2015. Experts believe that a “foehn” – an air current that warms quickly while descending a mountain – brought on the record, but global climate change is responsible, too. “I think of the warming of the atmosphere as like preheating an oven, and the polar ice sheets are like frozen lasagna,” one researcher said, “Now even the frozen lasagna is starting to defrost at high polar latitude. This is exactly in line of what we’ve been seeing for decades.”
INNOVATION
In central Italy, geologists drilled a 2-mile well in search of unprecedented geothermal energy, and they almost got it. At that depth is a high abundance of “supercritical geothermal fluids,” highly-pressured waters that are neither gas or liquid. If tapped, these fluids could spin turbines on the surface and be “one of the most energy-dense forms of renewable power in the world.” In this study, the drilling equipment succumbed to extreme pressure and heat just before reaching the pay dirt, but the researchers still consider their work a success. Skeptics believe that this type of geothermal energy is at best impossible and at worst liable to cause major earthquakes, but the authors of this study hope their research can relieve some of the anxiety.
MARINE LIFE
A new paper answers a disturbing question in marine biology: why does sonar often cause mass beaked whale strandings? By analyzing tag data from twenty-six individuals, researchers found that these marine mammals dive with incredible stealth and synchronization. To avoid their main predators, killer whales, up to 99% of a beaked whale pod will dive over 3,000 feet at the same time and in total silence. This behavior comes with dangerous energy demands, and unfortunately beaked whales often mistake sonar from naval ships for killer whale clicks. As one author explained, “Predation avoidance has been such a strong pressure in the evolution of beaked whale behavior that any sound resembling killer whales will elicit an intense stress response.”
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