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Recently, scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution wrapped up the most comprehensive study of the twilight zone in history, helping to establish that some 11 billion tons of microorganisms, crustaceans, squid, fish and gelatinous animals that live there are helping to draw down a third of the carbon dioxide emitted by human activity, likely saving us and our planet from catastrophic climate change.

Just as we are learning to appreciate the extraordinary service of creatures in the twilight zone, companies that manufacture feed for industrial fish farms, fertilizer and omega-3 supplements are preparing to exploit it. Right now nations are considering authorizing commercial fishing fleets to grind life in the twilight zone into fish meal, fertilizer and plant food. Before they move forward with these plans, it would be wise to hit pause so we can understand how that decision will affect our planet.

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They can’t exploit them—yet—as seabed mining in international waters is currently prohibited. But a little-known agency affiliated with the United Nations is working furiously to write the rulebook for the nascent, and controversial, industry. (...) Billions of dollars, of course, are also at stake.

Leticia Carvalho, a Brazilian oceanographer, wants to lead the obscure yet powerful organization at the heart of these debates.

That agency is the International Seabed Authority (ISA), and it’s electing its next leader at the end of July. Established under the 1982 U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and a related implementation agreement in 1994, the ISA is an autonomous international organization made up of all the states parties to UNCLOS. There are currently 169 members (168 states plus the European Union).

The organization rarely makes global headlines from its perch in Kingston, Jamaica, but it is charged with regulating a potentially massive new industry that doesn’t yet exist—and the person at its helm is set to play a highly influential role in shaping its future.

Negotiations on whether to allow deep sea mining to go ahead at the International Seabed Authority (ISA), have been rocked by the publication of a groundbreaking study that reveals that the polymetallic nodules that mining companies want to extract from the ocean may be producing " dark oxygen" in the deep sea. Delegates from Panama and Costa Rica have taken the floor to highlight the significance of this discovery and call for precaution.

A family in Wales is farming in the ocean. On suspended ropes, they farm seaweed, mussels, oysters, and scallops. This method is not just mutually beneficial for what they farm, but is also helps the ocean habitat.

There are no nets around the area, so wildlife is free to enter the area.

One major way this farming method helps is that it creates an exclusion zone to prevent fishermen from trawling it. This could have a direct positive impact on over-fishing by giving wildlife safe havens.

Brown believes a thriving ocean farming industry could provide solutions to the UK’s fish stock, which is in “a deeply troubling state” according to a report that found half of the key populations to be overfished. “It would create stepping stones where we have safe havens for fish and other organisms,” he adds.

Welcome to the deep ocean. Commonly considered to be the waters below 200 meters (656 feet), the deep ocean is a place where it is dark, food is scarce, and temperatures and pressures are extreme. Life is hard here, but there’s a lot of it.

There’s no place like home, but what does home look like for creatures of the deep? The variety of habitats in the deep ocean is extraordinary. These habitats are radically different from those anywhere else on Earth, and they’re host to organisms that have adapted to survive harsh conditions that are unimaginable to those of us on land.

Seamounts and canyons, deep-sea corals and sponges, chemosynthetic features like hydrothermal vents and cold seeps, and the water column are just some examples of the features — both geological and biological — that provide habitat for the deep ocean’s wildly wonderful life forms.

In June 2024, in recognition of National Ocean Month and World Ocean Day, we shared information about these habitats and some of the creatures that call them home.

Signed by 827 marine science & policy experts from over 44 countries

Something is pumping out large amounts of oxygen at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, at depths where a total lack of sunlight makes photosynthesis impossible.

The phenomenon was discovered in a region strewn with ancient, plum-sized formations called polymetallic nodules, which could play a part in the oxygen production by catalysing the splitting of water molecules, researchers suspect.

“We have another source of oxygen on the planet, other than photosynthesis,” says study co-author Andrew Sweetman, a sea-floor ecologist at the Scottish Association for Marine Science in Oban, UK — although the mechanism behind this oxygen production remains a mystery. The findings could also have implications for understanding how life began, he says, as well as for the possible impact of deep-sea mining in the region.

Sweetman and his collaborators first noticed something amiss during field work in 2013. The researchers were studying sea-floor ecosystems in the Clarion–Clipperton Zone, an area between Hawaii and Mexico that is larger than India and a potential target for the mining of metal-rich nodules.

“I suddenly realized that for eight years I’d been ignoring this potentially amazing new process, 4,000 metres down on the ocean floor,” says Sweetman.

Ocean diatoms, like Cylindrotheca closterium, build biomass by both photosynthesis and consuming organic carbon, a finding that may change our view of the global carbon cycle.

This research is led by bioengineers, bioinformatics experts, and other genomics researchers at the University of California San Diego. The new findings are published in Science Advances on July 17, 2024.

The team showed that the diatom Cylindrotheca closterium, which is found in oceans around the world, regularly performs a simultaneous mix of both photosynthesis and direct eating of carbon from organic sources such as plankton. In more than 70% of the water samples the researchers analyzed from oceans around the world, the researchers found signs of simultaneous photosynthesis and direct organic carbon consumption from Cylindrotheca closterium.

The research team hopes this work will stimulate interest in taking a much closer look at our understanding of the global carbon cycle, taking into consideration this new broader understanding of how ocean diatoms get their carbon.

What the bacteria feeding the diatoms may be getting out of the relationship is another question for further research.

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2004 ... researchers knew relatively little about the state of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC), an ocean system that transports warm water and nutrients around the Atlantic Ocean.

A new study by René van Westen at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and his colleagues suggests the AMOC could tip towards collapse between 2037 and 2064, with a mean estimate of 2050.

The collapse of the AMOC could lead to rapid sea level rise in North America, a sudden and severe drop in temperatures across northern Europe and serious disruption to monsoons across Asia.

Van Westen and his team’s work is the second study in as many years to predict a mid-century collapse of the AMOC, following a 2023 paper by Peter and Susanne Ditlevsen, both at the University of Copenhagen.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says a full AMOC collapse is unlikely in the current century, based on climate modelling.

Niklas Boers at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany says other evidence does show that the AMOC has become increasingly unstable in the past century. ... “These uncertainties absolutely prevent you from making sharp estimates of when the actual time of tipping would be,” he says.

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India will apply for licences to explore for deep-sea minerals in the Pacific Ocean

The UN-backed International Seabed Authority (ISA) has issued 31 deep-sea exploration licences, including two for India in the Indian Ocean, but is yet to allow mining because the 36-member body is still working on regulations.

China, Russia, and some Pacific Island nations have already secured exploration licences for the Pacific Ocean.

Opponents of deep-sea mining say that not enough is known about its impact on marine ecosystems.

Some 27 countries have called for a moratorium or suspension of all ocean mining-related activities,

The permits last for 15 years, according to the ISA website.

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The plastic-digesting capabilities of the fungus Parengyodontium album could be harnessed to degrade polyethylene, the most abundant type of plastic in the ocean

A fungus found on litter floating in the North Pacific Ocean can break down the most abundant type of plastic that ends up in the sea.

Vaksmaa believes that the fungus, known as Parengyodontium album, has great potential, but she is cautious about putting it to use in the wild. “If we take a microbe and add it to a natural system, then we may ruin it while trying to do good,” she says. Instead, she suggests it may be best to gather the plastic first and bring it back to land to be digested by P. album that has been grown in bulk. This could be achieved using well-established techniques, similar to those used in the brewing industry, she says.

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Oceans swallow huge amounts of carbon dioxide pollution each year, helping to mitigate climate change, but at the cost of the seas becoming more and more acidic. But what if we could increase the Atlantic’s appetite for the greenhouse gas by giving it the equivalent of a giant antacid tablet?

That is the basic hypothesis behind a controversial geoengineering experiment planned by scientists at the highly respected Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, a private marine research non-profit organization.

“We don’t want there to be a prospect of a whale or something coming into contact with that,” said Daniel McCorkle, a co-principal investigator for the sodium hydroxide experiment and emeritus scientist in WHOI’s department of geology and geophysics.

“We don’t know exactly what the risks are, because no one has been crazy enough to do this before,” said Ben Day, a Massachusetts-based senior campaign manager for Friends of the Earth. “It’s kind of like the thinking that got us here in the first place: Thinking that we can control Earth’s systems without unintended consequences.”

Even a relatively small amount of sodium hydroxide solution released in the ocean will kill “foundational” marine life, including phytoplankton, zooplankton, and fish larvae, and displace or injure other creatures due to the huge spikes in alkalinity, said James Kerry, an adjunct marine scientist at the James Cook University in Australia.

“I see it, essentially, as trying to address one form of marine pollution — carbon dioxide — with another” pollutant, said Kerry, who is also a senior marine and climate scientist for OceanCare, a marine conservation nonprofit organization based in Switzerland.

Summary:

New research could lead to major improvements in marine oil spill cleanup processes. The innovative study assessed the impact of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on microscopic seawater bacteria that perform a significant role in ecosystem functioning.

University of Stirling - January 22, 2024

Oxygen is a vital element for virtually all animals on Earth and many microbes. But oxygen concentrations are falling in some of the most valuable ecosystems on the planet. According to a recent paper, the number of freshwater and coastal water bodies with little to no oxygen has increased in coastal areas, with hundreds of regions affected worldwide. Meanwhile, in the open ocean, oxygen-deficient waters have increased fourfold since 1960.

In the new paper, published in Nature Ecology & Evolution, researchers around the globe are urging leaders to acknowledge the ocean’s oxygen loss as a new “planetary boundary.” Planetary boundaries are global thresholds for major Earth systems, beyond which humanity cannot safely operate. The nine existing boundaries include climate change and freshwater. In this Q&A, we spoke with co-author Denise Breitburg, a scientist emerita at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, on why ocean oxygen should become the 10th planetary boundary. Edited for brevity and clarity.

James Lange remembers the day he and a team of botanists and conservationists gathered at a rock formation encircled by a thicket of mangroves in Key Largo, Florida. They’d come to the nation’s last wild stand of a rare cacti to confront the inevitable. With sea level rise bringing the Atlantic Ocean ever closer to the withering plants, the group had made the difficult decision to remove the cacti’s remaining green material, preserve it in nurseries, and hope that it might one day be reintroduced in the wild.

Three years later, research published last week reveals what Lange and the others long suspected: The demise of the Key Largo tree cactus is the first recorded case of sea level rise driving a local species to extinction in the United States. Its collapse was a blow to Lange, a research botanist at Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in Coral Gables who co-authored the study. “It was one of the things that made the Keys so special,” he said. “Just a big, bold, beautiful plant.”