[Newfie]

Renault has let construction contracts on two 500’ car carriers, primarially sail powered. They are to run a route from France to USA to St Pierre/Miquelon and back to France. The St Pierre stop makes little sense as it is quite small, unless it is just for general provisioning.

Odd looking boats.

https://gcaptain.com/french-automaker-u ... -carriers/

https://gcaptain.com/neoline-selects-sh ... argo-ship/

[Tanada]

Sounds great in theory but I suspect they will be using the 'auxiliary diesel' quite a lot to stay on schedule. In the true days of sail delivery dates were a week, or sometimes month, not within a certain number of hours on a specific day.

[dohboi]

Life in the oceans does not seem to be doing very well:

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/six-righ ... 1256815b3a


Scientists Fear Extinction After Six Rare Right Whales Die In A Month
Researchers call for emergency protections as 400 remaining animals fight for their lives.


(factoid: "The penis on a right whale can be up to 2.7 m (8.9 ft) – the testes, at up to 2 m (6.6 ft) in length, 78 cm (2.56 ft) in diameter, and weighing up to 525 kg (1157 lbs), are also by far the largest of any animal on Earth" ! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_whale )

[Ibon]

A floating mass of seaweed stretching from West Africa to the Gulf of Mexico is now the biggest seaweed bloom in the world, according to satellite observations.
The algal explosion in the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea could signify a new normal, say US scientists.
Deforestation and fertiliser use are among the factors thought to be driving the growth

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-48869100

Sargassum sea weed forms huge mats in the Caribbean every year in the summer months. The inputs of human waste and agricultural runoffs are making this growth explosive. These vast area of mats of seaweed form an important role in the marine environment much like coral reefs. They provide structure and act as a nursery for many forms of life. When we lived in Florida and went to the beach in the summer months the tide would bring in these huge rafts of Sargassum seaweed. We would wade out in chest deep water with nets and glass jars and sweep under the seaweed collecting marine crabs, shrimp and small fish, put them in the jar and then take them to shore to show people the marine life that was in these rafts of seaweed. Recreational fisherman look for these rafts of seaweed because dolphins (the fish not the mammal, also called Mahimahi) frequent the edge of these rafts as they prey on bait fish that use the rafts of seaweed as structure to hide in. Recreational fisherman will throw lures or troll along the edge to catch mahimahi.

These huge rafts of seaweed are normal every summer in the Caribbean. They are probably now growing to enormous unusual size due to fertilizer inputs caused by humans. There is probably a tipping point when this will start to create so much organic matter that it will wreak some form of imbalance like a red tide or something. Who knows?

[KaiserJeep]

The centuries-old scallop fishery on Nantucket is already a casualty of lawn fertilizer runoff along the Atlantic coast. The juvenile scallops attach themselves to eelgrass, a type of sea weed growing on shallow water sand bars. The lawn fertilizer clouds the water with plankton growth and reduces the amount of seaweed available to anchor the young scallops. It is a form of habitat destruction.

[derhundistlos]

dohboi-

I greatly appreciate your efforts in reporting the death by a thousand cuts now decimating life in the oceans. The scientific community, finally, is beginning to sound the alarm that unless an immediate course correction, we are at the precipice of major tipping points.

I strongly recommend the following presentation by Dr. Jeremy Jackson titled, "Ocean Apocalypse". Dr. Jackson was invited by the US Naval Academy to provide a current state of affairs regarding the health of the world's oceans. Here is the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zMN3dTvrwY&t=128s

[dohboi]

Thanks, dhil. That's a keeper!

[dohboi]

Ancient 'dead seas' offer a stark warning for our own future

http://www.theecologist.org/blogs_and_c ... uture.html
Quote

For long periods animals in ancient oceans could live only in shallow surface waters, above vast 'dead zones' inhabited only by anoxic bacteria, writes Richard Pancost. Human activity is now creating immense new dead zones, and global warming could be helping as it reduces vertical mixing of waters. Could this be the beginning of something big?

[dohboi]

Data Confirms Growing Dead Zone in Chesapeake Bay

https://phys.org/news/2019-08-dead-zone ... e-bay.html

Maryland scientists have been warning of a growing "dead zone" in the Chesapeake Bay. Now the numbers are in, confirming their dire warnings were correct.

Natural Resources Department data shows an area with little to no oxygen spread to 2 cubic miles (8 cubic kilometers) by late July, making it one of the worst in decades. By comparison, July dead zones averaged about 1.35 cubic miles (6 cubic kilometers) for the past 35 years. The worst section includes the lower Potomac and Patuxent rivers and much of the Bay, from Baltimore to the mouth of the York River.

University of Maryland environmental scientists say heavy rains washed wastewater and agricultural runoff into the bay and produced oxygen-stealing algae. Scientists fear it could harm crabs, oysters and the state's seafood industry

[dohboi]

Breaching a “Carbon Threshold” Could Lead to Mass Extinction

https://eapsweb.mit.edu/news/2019/breac ... extinction

When he introduced carbon dioxide at greater rates, he found that once the levels crossed a critical threshold, the carbon cycle reacted with a cascade of positive feedbacks that magnified the original trigger, causing the entire system to spike, in the form of severe ocean acidification.

The system did, eventually, return to equilibrium, after tens of thousands of years in today’s oceans — an indication that, despite a violent reaction, the carbon cycle will resume its steady state.
This pattern matches the geological record, Rothman found. The characteristic rate exhibited by half his database results from excitations above, but near, the threshold. Environmental disruptions associated with mass extinction are outliers — they represent excitations well beyond the threshold. At least three of those cases may be related to sustained massive volcanism.

“When you go past a threshold, you get a free kick from the system responding by itself,” Rothman explains. “The system is on an inexorable rise. This is what excitability is, and how a neuron works too.”

Although carbon is entering the oceans today at an unprecedented rate, it is doing so over a geologically brief time. Rothman’s model predicts that the two effects cancel: Faster rates bring us closer to the threshold, but shorter durations move us away.

Insofar as the threshold is concerned, the modern world is in roughly the same place it was during longer periods of massive volcanism.

In other words, if today’s human-induced emissions cross the threshold and continue beyond it, as Rothman predicts they soon will, the consequences may be just as severe as what the Earth experienced during its previous mass extinctions.

See also:

Mathematics predicts a sixth mass extinction

http://news.mit.edu/2017/mathematics-pr ... ction-0920

"By 2100, oceans may hold enough carbon to launch mass extermination of species in future millennia."

[dissident]

Ancient 'dead seas' offer a stark warning for our own future

http://www.theecologist.org/blogs_and_c ... uture.html
Quote

For long periods animals in ancient oceans could live only in shallow surface waters, above vast 'dead zones' inhabited only by anoxic bacteria, writes Richard Pancost. Human activity is now creating immense new dead zones, and global warming could be helping as it reduces vertical mixing of waters. Could this be the beginning of something big?

"Could"? Nonsensical waffle language. It is the beginning of something big. Merely warming the surface ocean generates anoxia through the acceleration of bacterial decomposition. But that is not all. The oxygen mixing to these depths drops thanks to the warming of the surface waters and thanks to the associated steepening of the thermocline, which suppressed eddy mixing (which drives O2 transport) from the surface waters to the deeper waters. So global warming drives a nonlinear growth of anoxic zones.

[Newfie]

Sounds like they are making some progress in making the plastic capture device work. I’m still not at all sure how well it’s working and if it’s capturing enough to justify the effort.

https://www.ecowatch.com/ocean-cleaning ... belltitem3