Ocean Conservation & Tidalpunk

Researchers have prototyped sensor-packed robot bugs that mimic biological digestive systems to meet energy needs, employ a Janus interface for a steady supply of nutrients and move on the water's surface like a water strider.

Called the Ocean of Things – and similar in essence to the multitude of sensor-packed smart devices that collect info across the Internet of Things – the project page states that sensor data would be uploaded to government-owned cloud storage for analysis, and that the OoT would support military missions while also being open to research bodies and commercial concerns.

The paper

The study analyses the water temperature of the Baltic Sea during the warm period 1993-2023 (May-August). The results show that the Lithuanian part of the Baltic Sea has experienced marine heatwaves almost every year. It is also observed that heatwaves in recent years last much longer than at the beginning of the study period.

The study

For decades, an oxygen-depleted dead zone that is harmful to sea life has appeared in the Gulf of Mexico in a region off the coasts of Louisiana and Texas. This year, it's larger than average, federal scientists announced in a report Thursday.

This year, the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico entered into the top third of largest dead zones in records that go back 38 years, (..)

The 2024 zone in the Gulf is about 6,705 square miles, which is an area roughly the size of New Jersey.

The latest measurement is about 1,000 square miles larger than NOAA's prediction in June, calculated using discharge from the Mississippi River and nutrient runoff data from the U.S. Geological Survey.

Out of sight, out of mind

In presentations of mCDR strategies, the deep ocean is routinely depicted schematically as a black, featureless abyss, without acknowledgement that the receiving environments for carbon disposal are biodiverse, heterogeneous, and provide critical ecosystem functions. Up until the 1970s, plans for retrieving minerals from the deep seabed likewise included no recognition of the potential harm caused to species living there. While such impacts now motivate many DSM debates, proposals for mCDR continue to rely on an outdated view of the deep ocean as a place where waste can be dumped far from sight and without consequences.

Research into the risks associated with DSM has informed a counter-narrative to the emergency framing and “climatism” used by proponents of deep-seabed mineral extraction. A similar counter-narrative has yet to receive comparable attention in current debates on the feasibility and safety of mCDR but is very much needed. Consideration of a wide array of risks associated with large-scale mCDR interventions and consequences for marine ecosystems and environments is rapidly becoming essential as business interests outpace science and policy development. Like DSM, mCDR needs to be carefully considered not in relation to narrowly framed numerical climate targets, but within a holistic framework including potential far-reaching impacts on marine life, deep-ocean ecosystems and social equity.

Ocean acidification refers to a reduction in the pH of the ocean over an extended period of time, caused primarily by uptake of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere.

For more than 200 years, or since the industrial revolution, the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere has increased due to the burning of fossil fuels and land use change. The ocean absorbs about 30 percent of the CO2 that is released in the atmosphere, and as levels of atmospheric CO2 increase, so do the levels in the ocean. (...)

Climate impacts are triggering a host of novel bio- and geoengineering interventions to save coral reefs. This Comment challenges heroic scientific assumptions and advocates for a more systemic, evidence-based approach to caring for coral reefs.

For example, evidence shows that resilience and recovery are an inherent feature of natural ecosystems. The assumption that human intervention can deliver a better outcome is not supported by data: a synthesis of 400 studies of post-disturbance recovery shows no consistent benefits with human restoration compared to natural recovery^9^. Disturbed ecosystems undoubtedly display recovery debt, that is, “deficits in biodiversity and functions”^10^. But passive recovery as a natural process supports continued functioning and, most importantly, avoids further human disturbance.

Recent evidence from the northern Great Barrier Reef supports nature’s un-aided capacity to recover in the short term, with coral cover jumping from 10%, the lowest ever recorded, to a record high of 36% in just six years following the last major bleaching event. It was not coral reseeding or biophysical interventions that delivered this outcome over vast spatial scales, but natural recruitment and regrowth. Unfortunately, current and future heatwaves will continue to kill these regrown corals, rendering this natural success ephemeral. Yet to date, there is little evidence that the ecological dynamics that enabled this regrowth will cease to exist, or that active interventions — which have the stated goal of increasing cover of the same fast-growing corals — can have any population-wide impact^11^.

(...)Therefore, rather than being preoccupied with how to intervene, the scientific community can prudently step back and consider how to have less, not more, influence on nature.

A deliberate reduction of human influence on natural systems is not careless withdrawal, but a radical acceptance of our limited capacity to predict and influence specific outcomes within complex natural systems. (...)

Something remarkable has happened to A23a, the world's biggest iceberg.

For months now it has been spinning on the spot just north of Antarctica when really it should be racing along with Earth's most powerful ocean current.

Scientists say the frozen block, which is more than twice the size of Greater London, has been captured on top of a huge rotating cylinder of water.

For three decades it was a static "ice island". It didn't budge. It wasn't until 2020 that it re-floated and started to drift again, slowly at first, before then charging north towards warmer air and waters.

Prof Taylor showed how a current that meets an obstruction on the seafloor can - under the right circumstances - separate into two distinct flows, generating a full-depth mass of rotating water between them.

A23a is a perfect illustration once again of the importance of understanding the shape of the seafloor.

A23a's behaviour can be explained because the ocean bottom just north of South Orkney is reasonably well surveyed.

That's not the case for much of the rest of the world.

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