Our World and Everything in It

I couldn’t post a blog last night because I lost my dial tone again. It just came back on so I’m getting this out there as fast as I can. I couldn’t research what I wanted to blog about and maybe that’s a good thing because I caught an absolutely fantastic show on WGTE, Toledo Public TV last night as part of their Strange Days on Planet Earth series. Ed Norton narrated current findings relative to global warming that are directly tied to of all things fish and mankind. Like he said no one would ever consider fish as heroes of the global warming battle but after last night’s presentation the realization of how man is so intimately connected to everything on earth, that every little thing we do, every little thing we eat like a sardine, affects us and sometimes in very bad ways that only adds to global warming and loss of more food.

What was showcased is the latest correlation between man and global warming concerns fish. Did you know that Namibia besides being the birthplace of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt’s baby is also home to one of the world’s richest fisheries? At least Namibia was rich with fish 40 years ago, where millions of tons of fish were processed per year and sold worldwide.
 
Namibia is one of the most productive ocean systems in the world because it enjoys almost constant ocean winds, which churn up nutrients like plankton from the bottom. Sardines love plankton and swarmed the area in the millions. But man over fished the sardines years ago and although Namibia has made a concentrated effort to recover their fish populations, it’s just not happening. Fleets of fishing boats from Europe and other far away places invaded that space and harvested, and harvested, ten million sardines in one month’s time sometimes, without enforced regulations to stifle the pillaging.

So what about sardines you say? As part of another delicate ecosystem that has been disrupted by mankind, the sardine is necessary to insure the plankton does not build up on the ocean floor. Rotting plankton has a very detrimental effect.  Hydrogen sulfide and methane production is the by-product of rotting plankton. Sulfur is that rotten egg smelling gas.

As a result of over fishing sardines, Namibia’s coastline now boasts a strange shift in ocean color on a regular basis. Some call it lemonade, or a whitish ethereal color appears while the horrible stench of rotten eggs is emitted, and then unimaginable amounts of dead fish float up and line the shoreline. With all the over-fishing in our oceans today, we do not need this additional kill off of fish. It’s creating a cycle where we’re going to end up with no fish at all.

Three people figured out what’s happening in Namibia. A marine biologist, Brownen Currie, a satellite expert Scarla Weeks, and an oceanographer Andrew Bakun figured out that deep-sea eruptions were taking place and emitting hydrogen sulfide. Bakun found that deep sea eruptions coincided with desert rain, that atmospheric storms that pass over the ocean’s surface cause pressure on top that translates to pressure at the bottom where the buildup of hydrogen sulfide and methane lay. Eruptions on the ocean floor take place releasing millions of bubbles of the two gases. As methane rises to the surface it expands and becomes explosive.

Experts have known about these eruptions for a while and figured they were isolated incidents, but when Scarla Weeks, a satellite expert became involved a whole other scenario surfaced. From satellite images in space these eruptions were shown to be increasingly more virulent, and are occurring back to back, growing out of control into huge events covering hundreds of kilometers over the ocean.

This is where my eyes bugged out. I wrote a blog about a CO2 explosion at the bottom of a lake in Africa, which resulted in a cloud of gas belching into the night and traveling miles to kill 1700 people. At first, it was thought to be a methane gas explosion like those happening off of Namibia. Then I remembered writing a blog about the first global warming event some 40 million years ago that incinerated the earth. It was caused by a ½ degree in temperature change over a longer period of time than we’re experiencing now. It happened because of constant methane eruptions on the ocean floor from an earth that was still forming.  The atmosphere eventually filled with methane, which is twenty six times more effective at trapping heat than carbon dioxide, and the earth fried.

Scientists have always thought that it was impossible for methane or carbon dioxide to build up like that again on the ocean floor due to the constant movement of water. Wrong again. It seems like what we’re facing now is totally new territory. But there are still quite a few obstinate people who will not see that humans are affecting the earth in a myriad of ways that is upsetting the intricate balance of all living things. This is just one of the ways we’ve impacted the earth and helped global warming along. I remember someone I talked to about environmental events brushing off the idea that an increase in earthquakes is tied to global warming. Why not? Now that we know atmospheric pressure on the surface of seawater affects pressure at the bottom of the sea, it’s quite possible that atmospheric pressure can affect pressure below the earth’s surface just as easily, and there are a lot more earthquakes happening lately.

The idea of eating fish because it is healthy for us is starting to resemble the idea of drinking bottled water. We do it for our own health but do not realize the affects of those actions, that it hurts the earth to toss that plastic in a trash dump or along the roadside, every bit as much as over harvesting even the smallest fish. Without strict fishing regulations, new ways of farming fish, (more about that mess in another blog), and a quick attitude change by the human population to conserve, it doesn’t appear there will be enough in the wild to sustain mankind worldwide. 

Read more about methane explosions and Namibia at: http://www.pbs.org/strangedays/episodes/dangerouscatch/experts/stench.html.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 24th, 2008 at 6:24 pm and is filed under Africa, Animals in Peril, Conservation, Environmentalism, Fishing, Food, Global Warming, Industry, Marine Life, Nature, PBS, Weather/Climate. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.