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Earth

Low Oxygen Levels Along PNW Coast a 'Silent' Climate Change Crisis (oregonlive.com) 75

Posted by BeauHD from the hit-hard-by-changing-conditions dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Oregon Live: Nearly two decades ago, fishers discovered an odd occurrence off the coast of Oregon. They were pulling up pots of dead or lethargic crabs. At first they suspected a chemical spill or a red tide. But instead, they learned, dangerously low levels of dissolved oxygen in the ocean water were to blame. The crabs had suffocated. These swaths of hypoxic areas have surfaced every summer on Pacific Northwest shores since it was first recorded in 2002. They are spurred by naturally occurring coastal upwellings and algae blooms, exacerbated by climate change, said Francis Chan, director of the Cooperative Institute for Marine Resources Studies at Oregon State University. Akin to fire season, hypoxia season arrived earlier this year -- the earliest start in 20 years, according to Chan. But unlike wildfire, or other visible climate emergencies, it's gone largely unrecognized. "It's kind of a silent problem happening out there," said Chan. "This year, I can look out and see trees with one side burnt because of the heat wave. As I'm driving on McKenzie highway, I can see Mount Jefferson has no snow on it. But when you drive out to the ocean, it looks exactly the same as last summer."

Typically, hypoxic conditions haven't arrived to the nearshore until mid-June or July. This year hypoxic conditions were reported in April with the upwelling season beginning in March. To get a sense of why an early beginning to the upwelling season is concerning, Chan compared it to the summer drought season. "Say we expected rainfall lasting until March but the rain stops in February. That's all the water we have. We have to last until next year." Similarly, if upwelling starts a month earlier than usual, the amount of oxygen, already low, has to last until the fall when storms promote mixing which adds oxygen back into the system. Chan said as of late September this year, upwelling is still occurring and low levels of oxygen are still persisting.

Climate change is playing a role in worsening oxygen levels. Simply put, warmer water holds less oxygen because the oxygen molecules are moving faster and are more likely to escape from the surface. A little more complicated, climate change is altering the structure of the oceans as the warmer upper layer is more buoyant than the cooler, deeper, already oxygen-poor ocean layer. The warmer upper layer keeps the deeper layer from "taking a breath," explained Chan. On a global scale, the oceans are already losing oxygen. Take this and add local factors like coastal upwelling and phytoplankton bloom decomposition off Washington and Oregon coasts, and you have a system with severely low oxygen levels. [...] There are no records of reoccurring low-oxygen levels like scientists have observed since 2002, despite over 50 years of oceanic monitoring.
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Low Oxygen Levels Along PNW Coast a 'Silent' Climate Change Crisis More

Low Oxygen Levels Along PNW Coast a 'Silent' Climate Change Crisis

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  • fixable with $$$ (Score:3)

    by MooseTick ( 895855 ) on Friday October 01, 2021 @08:34AM (#61850621) Homepage

    This seems fixable whenever humanity wants to spend some money. Any kid who has had an aquarium knows about how using an air pump can agitate the water and add oxygen. It seems if people powered a series of pumps with solar cells and placed them in low oxygen areas, it could slowly correct this problem.

    I know, I know the oceans are big. And I didn't even guess what this would cost, but if humanity did this at the same scale they mine mountains and destroy the rain forest (200,000 acres/day) then I'm positive this could be slowly corrected.

    • Re:fixable with $$$ (Score:5, Informative)

      by RJFerret ( 1279530 ) on Friday October 01, 2021 @08:50AM (#61850653)

      Well an aquarium air pump doesn't technically add oxygen, it just agitates the surface to keep the surface tension and scum from preventing gas exchange. That's not an issue for the ocean as described, quite the opposite, the warmer upper layer is having too much gas exchange and O2 is escaping at increasing rates due to the warmth, leaving it depleted!

      • Also the heat can kill off algae and kelp and other oxygen producers. This has been seen in some freshwater lakes in California as I read a few months back.

      • an aquarium air bubbler does in fact move water vertically, and that oxygen/CO2 exchanging water moving across the surface of the tank was formerly at a deeper depth, so in fact a bubbler does add oxygen to the deeper water faster than simple diffusion, a little bit like convection moves heat.

    • climate change because he makes about $500k/yr off a coal mine his son runs for him (and his son probably makes around $2/mil a year).

      Basically our entire civilization is at risk for some minor corruption and a piddling amount of cash. Ladies and gentlemen, the human race...

    • While you are pumping oxygen into the oceans to save crabs, someone else is dumping plastic and pesticides.

      ...then I'm positive this could be slowly corrected.

      The rate of extinction and habitat loss suggests that we are out of time.

    • Nonsense, the usual cause of environmental problems is selfish f***ers putting the own wealth first.

    • This seems fixable whenever humanity wants to spend some money. Any kid who has had an aquarium knows about how using an air pump can agitate the water and add oxygen. It seems if people powered a series of pumps with solar cells and placed them in low oxygen areas, it could slowly correct this problem.

      Don't pump in air, pump in oxygen. The US Navy has a program to synthesize hydrocarbon fuel using the H20 and C2O in the water. The O2 is cracked off during the process and could be returned to the water. It costs nothing because the intent is to get the H2 and C2 to synthesize fuels. The process may be heavy on the hydrogen because hydrogen can be used for more than fuels. This may concentrate the biomass bu there could be bio-oil extraction of interest too. Then comes extractions of salt lithium, ur

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by catprog ( 849688 )

        Uranium concentration in seawater: 3 milligrams of uranium per cubic meter

        How much power does 1kg of uranium produce: 24,000,000 kWh.

        So 72 kilowatt hours per cubic meter

        However they only achieve 33% efficiency so 20-30kwh.

        Desalination would take 3KWh

        However it is not the energy balance in question. It is the cost of it.

        If it is cheaper to get the uranium from land then the nuclear reactor will be powered by mined uranium instead,

        If it cheaper to use solar panels and wind turbines then a nuclear reactor the

        • If it cheaper to use solar panels and wind turbines then a nuclear reactor then they will be used instead.

          Yes, indeed, people will want to use the lowest cost energy sources. The only reason nuclear power costs so much now is because of a lack of experience in building and operating nuclear power plants. This is a trivial problem to solve, we need only build more nuclear power plants. Because wind and solar power take so much more labor, land, and material than nuclear power we will not see wind and solar power provide more power to electrical grids than nuclear power in any nation that took the time and eff

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by catprog ( 849688 )

            Storage:

            If you are filtering the water already why would you have a long pipe of high pressure salt water? Put it through the filter first and you now have a much easier fresh water fluid.

            Their is another option to deal with the bad weather days. Size your generation system for the bad days and you only need to store enough for the 24 hour cycle. (This does however only works if the generation is much cheaper then the alternatives) I.e if you count on 1KWh from 1KW of solar you have very few days that fail

            • Storage:

              If you are filtering the water already why would you have a long pipe of high pressure salt water? Put it through the filter first and you now have a much easier fresh water fluid.

              Their is another option to deal with the bad weather days. Size your generation system for the bad days and you only need to store enough for the 24 hour cycle. (This does however only works if the generation is much cheaper then the alternatives) I.e if you count on 1KWh from 1KW of solar you have very few days that fail to generate this. (Bonus: Very cheap power on the good days)

              The current uranium extraction tech is not actually making distilled water. What they do is lay fibers in the ocean and that attracts the uranium to it.

              Uranium is storage, that is why uranium will never need the same kinds of storage as wind and solar. A nuclear power plant is as isolated from weather as any battery, if not more so.

              We will not be without nuclear power because the costs of over building wind and solar capacity to cover for bad days would exceed the cost of nuclear power many times over.

              Why would anyone choose to abandon nuclear power? Nuclear power is already safer than wind and solar with a history of 2nd generation nuclear power plants,

  • Plants breathe CO2 to create Oxygen. We are so focussed on reducing Co2 maybe we are starving the algae and not enough O2 is getting produced.

    • Re:Maybe stop eliminating plant food (Score:4, Informative)

      by RJFerret ( 1279530 ) on Friday October 01, 2021 @08:54AM (#61850669)

      Erm, there's phytoplankton blooms, they're not being starved, vice-versa, as we know there's a surplus like never before! The issue mentioned in the excerpt is the increased warmth/energy results in O2 leaving sooner.

    • Funny way to look at a situation. Almost like one should allow murder because it helps in preventing a population explosion.

      • Funny way to look at a situation. Almost like one should allow murder because it helps in preventing a population explosion.

        With enough people killed, yes, it does. One can look at Genghis Khan's rampage to see how this works, or Stalin's holomdor in Ukraine (or Stalin's killings in general). Kill enough people and you do prevent a population explosion.
  • Could be the giga tons of plastic dumped into the Pacific , but then again I'm not a scientist I only took economics.

    • Could be the giga tons of plastic dumped into the Pacific

      Unlikely. Nearly all the plastic trash enters the ocean in Asian rivers and is then drawn into the Pacific Gyre, north of the Hawaiian Islands.

      Very little of that plastic trash reaches the PNW, and even less is generated there. In the PNW, people recycle obsessively and compost their toenail clippings.

    • More likely the gigatons of phosphorous and sulphur.

    • Could be the giga tons of plastic dumped into the Pacific , but then again I'm not a scientist I only took economics.

      You do know that plastic is (mostly) chemically inert, right? That sucks because it takes tons of time to decompose, but on the other hand at least it doesn't screw up water chemistry, like oxygen balance. That's why we also dump other shit (life fertilizer runoff) which do.

  • Ah, Pacific North West. Of course.

  • We keep messing with the world in discreet little parcels, little patches of our environment that we modify to suit our whim. And now we see that each little parcel is intractably connected. Dump that plastic waste into the ocean and make those cheap shoes even cheaper: damage plankton life cycles in the ocean. Spew forth tons of CO2 pulled from the ground as fossil fuels: damage the atmosphere in ways that exacerbates the damage to the oceans. Drench fields with fossil fuel derived fertilizers, herbici

  • Aha (Score:4, Funny)

    by groobly ( 6155920 ) on Friday October 01, 2021 @11:13AM (#61851111)

    Aha, I see. Perhaps those low oxygen levels is what has caused widespread delusional thinking in Portland and Seattle.

  • The Democrats aren't any better (Score:3)

    by KT0100101101010100 ( 7179190 ) on Friday October 01, 2021 @01:03PM (#61851537)

    It's disingenuous to accuse those companies to oppose the bill, when even Biden himself is breaking his promises after not even a year in office.

    https://www.npr.org/2021/07/13... [npr.org]

    Would Mr Biden please care to explain how he plans to reduce CO2 emissions when oil, gas and coal production continues to grow?

  • A system that takes CO2 from the water and H2O to get the C and H will have a lot of O left over to dump in the water. That is a process that will produce useful hydrocarbons else;where for plants for plants to convert to O2. That O2 will be dissolved in from the air into the water.

    Also, we will have systems to remove freshwater and some saltwater. The saltwater will have thorium, uranium, and other metals that re dangerous to life removed. These are elements we can use to make energy. Energy we can us

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by catprog ( 849688 )

      Nuclear reactors will only be powered from ocean uranium if it is cheaper then getting it from the land.

      If nuclear power plants are not cost competitive now with renewables then how will increasing fuel costs help?

      • Nuclear reactors will only be powered from ocean uranium if it is cheaper then getting it from the land.

        I agree. Your point?

        If nuclear power plants are not cost competitive now with renewables then how will increasing fuel costs help?

        Nuclear power plants are cost competitive with renewables. The extraction of uranium from the sea doesn't have to increase fuel costs.

        The reason that nuclear power costs so much all over the world is because we lost the experience needed to make nuclear power cheap. At some point, as a means to get energy costs under control, we will see nuclear power plants get built. We will build them by the dozens because that is how we get the needed experience. Once we have that experience it

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