Red Tide - Bioluminescent San Diego, 2011. Océans / Continent Plastique. Tierney Thys swims with the giant sunfish. Océans > Expéditions scientifiques marines. Warmer oceans release CO2 faster than thought - environment - 25 April 2011. As the world's oceans warm, their massive stores of dissolved carbon dioxide may be quick to bubble back out into the atmosphere and amplify the greenhouse effect, according to a new study. The oceans capture around 30 per cent of human carbon dioxide emissions and hide it in their depths. This slows the march of global warming somewhat.
But climate records from the end of the last ice age show that as temperatures climb, the trend reverses and the oceans emit CO2, which exacerbates warming. Previous studies have suggested that it takes between 400 and 1300 years for this to happen. But now the most precise analysis to date has whittled that figure down. Quick response "We now think the delay is more like 200 years, possibly even less," says Tas van Ommen from the Australian Antarctic Division, in Hobart, who led the study.
The new results come from Siple and Byrd ice cores in western Antarctica. Rising temperatures make carbon dioxide leak from the oceans for two main reasons.
Grandes profondeurs - Deep Sea. Acidification. Pollutions marines. Pêche & Surpêche. A steward for our oceans | Jason Hall-Spencer. When you stand on a beach looking out across an ocean, the effect can be to make you feel puny. It is easy to believe that there is little we humans can do to harm, or for that matter protect, the colossal oceans. Our perception of human impotence, of our inability to affect the oceans, is deeply rooted in the way we govern the seas today.
In the 17th century Hugo Grotius developed the doctrine of the "freedom of the seas", in the face of Portuguese and Spanish claims to sovereignty over vast areas of ocean. He argued that nobody could own the seas, which had been "created by nature for common use"; and was convinced that there were enough fish to go around, that the ocean could deal with what we threw at it and that the bounty was vast enough to share without ownership.
Like everyone, scientists immersed in their specialist topics can become blinkered to the bigger picture. Cmsdata.iucn.org/downloads/ipso_workshop_report_june_2011.pdf.
Oceans / Biodiversité. Paul Snelgrove: A census of the ocean.