[dohboi]

“Thousands of dead starfish have washed up on a beach in the United Kingdom”

https://twitter.com/CNN/status/971067131709313024

[dohboi]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/ene ... cd466288ac

15% slowdown in the AMOC since mid-20th C.

[dohboi]

More on the AMOC slowdown:

“I think we’re close to a tipping point,” climatologist Michael Mann told ThinkProgress in an email. The AMOC slow down “is without precedent” in more than a millennium he said, adding, “It’s happening about a century ahead of schedule relative to what the models predict.”

….

A slow-down in deepwater ocean circulation “would accelerate sea level rise off the northeastern United States, while a full collapse could result in as much as approximately 1.6 feet of regional sea level rise,” as the authors of the U.S. National Climate Assessment (NCA) explained in November.

https://thinkprogress.org/climate-tippi ... 633f968fc/

[Plantagenet]

Just flew into Hong Kong and was surprised to see ca. 100 jack up oil rigs crowded into the harbor——it looked like an armada.

The fear has always been that China was claiming all the South China Sea right up to the 3 mile border of Vietnam, The Phillipines, Malaysia, etc. so they could drill for all the oil in the whole South China Sea.

With ca. 100 jack up rigs for shallow offshore drilling sitting in Hong Kong right now, China is now positioned to start a huge offshore oil drilling campaign any time it wants to.

Cheers!

[dohboi]

Interesting. Thanks for the eye-witness account.

[dohboi]

Studying oxygen, scientists discover clues to recovery from mass extinction.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2 ... 132829.htm

. . . The resulting variations of uranium isotopes gave the team the answers they were looking for. They were able to show that episodes of extinction coincided with pulses of ocean anoxia, driven by changes in ocean circulation and nutrient levels.

“This finding,” says Zhang, “provides important insights into patterns of oceanic environmental change and their underlying causes, which were ultimately linked to intense climate warming during the Early Triassic.”

This team’s discovery also calls attention to the possible effects of modern climate change, because global warming was the ultimate driver of marine anoxia in the Early Triassic period.

“One of the most interesting and worrying things about the Permian-Triassic extinction is how similar those events are to what is happening today,” says co-author Stephen Romaniello. “Similar to what happened during the Permian period, the Earth’s modern oceans are facing rapid climate warming and enhanced nutrient fluxes.”

Point in fact, scientists have discovered more than 400 marine dead zones in the modern oceans. These are mostly linked to elevated nutrient fluxes in coastal areas, and global warming is likely to cause these zones to expand dramatically in the future.

“Our work shows that if we continue on our present course, there is a good chance that oxygen depletion will exacerbate the challenges marine organisms are already facing,” co-author Thomas Algeo added.