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Laurent Ye
Joined: Dec 21, 2008
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Country: Canada
Province/State: Quebec
City: Montréal
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Blue Deserts
June 16, 2009 - 12:49 PM
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Diamandis Fotini-Hellas' article, as published in the Weekly Green issue of September 22, 2008
Our planet’s temperature is gradually increasing (like that’s something we don’t already know). Even though we have begun to witness the consequences of this phenomenon in our society, there are greater and crucial repercussions, affecting different local ecosystems and terrestrial biodiversity, which we have yet to see.
Because our oceans’ temperature is rising, its water undergoes hypoxia: its amount of oxygen decreases (hypoxic water). Slowly, the water loses its ability to dissolve oxygen when its natural physical conditions, (temperature, density, etc…), change. Each of its particles will then expand itself as much as possible and that is very dangerous: this expansion is nearly impossible to stop. Therefore, oceans will eventually cover more and more surface. This terrible phenomenon is what French scientists call “les deserts des oceans”, in other words, “the blue deserts”.
Now, the warming of the ocean’s surface also causes it to stratify itself. The hypoxic water, less dense, forms a layer above the cold and denser water. Obviously, the two layers can’t mix with each other. The end result is that all the oxygen and nutriments contained in the sea is located at its surface. While we, humans, don’t really mind that (or even remotely care for that matter), the poor little aquatic creatures living in the deep areas do. Since they cannot receive a proper amount of oxygen and nutriments, they are left for dead 20 000 leagues under the sea (no pun intended).
Global warming (my, my, what a familiar term!) is causing the average temperature of the Earth to increase, and the same goes for the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans. This will surely affect the marine fauna’s productivity, leading to their eventual demise. Now the blue deserts do not only affect aquatic species, certain earth creatures also begin to suffer from this phenomenon. Because of the quantity of oxygen in the air is unstable, they cannot adapt themselves correctly to their natural habitats and must relocate themselves elsewhere if they want to have a chance to survive.
All in all, it is time for us to realize that the “blue deserts” phenomenon is a source of environmental threat. We must find a way to stop it before irreversible damages are done to our global ecosystem and diverse species. The first step towards correcting this dire situation is to eliminate the global warming! Scientist, who studied that case and revealed their results in the Geophysical Research Letters, are well aware that the global warming might not be the only core problem but it still constitutes one of the main reasons why the seas expand themselves.
For more information, please visit the following websites:
www.noaanews.noaa.gov
www.nasa.gov
Weekly Green, being part of the solution
This post was edited on: 2009-06-16 at 01:02 PM by: laurentye
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siddiqua
Joined: Feb 20, 2005
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Re: Blue Deserts
June 17, 2009 - 06:21 AM
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So oceans expanding are the cause of seas swallowing up the land in coastal areas and tsunamis too are a result of warming of the oceans. Its terrible but amazing how even oceans could be called deserts. Recently I am across a finding that sunscreens kill corals.
[link="http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/01/080129-sunscreen-coral.html"]
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