The Oceans Are Running Out of Oxygen

Researchers led by Scripps Institution of Oceanography say the loss of oxygen in waters is driven primarily by human-caused warming, nutrient pollution, and changes in the ventilation of interior waters. Warmer water holds less dissolved oxygen, and less water circulation results in oxygen-rich surface waters not mixing into deeper regions. 

The consequences from the oxygen loss could be irreversible and will make our planet less resilient and unstable, according to the scientists. The loss threatens life from the bottom to the top of the food chain—from microscopic organisms to sharks—and disrupts the chemical and biological processes that regulate our planet’s climate. Even marine mammals that breathe oxygen from surface air, like whales, are affected because the loss of oxygen impacts their prey and ecosystems.

The new study is an effort to show how aquatic oxygen loss should be considered a major threat to life on Earth along with ocean acidification, biodiversity loss, chemical pollution, and climate change. 

The study was published in the journal Limnology and Oceanography.

The largest cut will be to Arizona, which will lose 31 percent of its allotment, according to sources who spoke to the Los Angeles Times. Nevada would see its share drop by 28 percent and California by 12 percent through 2028. The plan is consistent with what the three states offered earlier this year to reduce their combined withdrawals from the river by more than three-million-acre feet. 

Those Lower Basin states could have lost more. Earlier this year, the Bureau of Reclamation released a draft impact statement that could have cut Arizona’s supply by 77 percent and perhaps even higher by 98 percent. According to the Times, the federal government will not impose cuts to the allocations of the four Upper Basin states of Wyoming, Utah, New Mexico, and Colorado—for now.

The water levels at the river’s two large reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, have reached historic lows, and for many months, the seven states in the Basin have been trying to come to an agreement on how to manage the river but with no luck.

But you’d be wrong to assume Trump doesn’t like offshore development, period. His Department of the Interior has moved to open federal waters ​to other industrial activities, including offshore spaceports and deep-sea mining, 

Now, his administration has announced it wants to put nuclear power projects in the ocean. Last week, the Marine Minerals Administration (MMA) and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that establishes a framework for how they would evaluate future nuclear energy projects on the outer continental shelf of the U.S. 

The MOU does not authorize nuclear development in the ocean. The goal is to be ready because Trump aims to quadruple U.S. nuclear power capacity by 2050, in part to meet power demands of data centers. Also, there’s growing interest in developing nuclear projects. 

One interested company is a startup called Bluecore Energy, which raised $10M to put small nuclear reactors (SMRs) on floating barges. Having only launched six months ago, Bluecore has established operations at the Port of Long Beach in California and is building a test reactor that it says, if approved, would deliver reliable power directly to ports and nearby infrastructure—with zero greenhouse gas emissions.

One such group are sperm whales. They converse through energetic and rhythmic clicks called codas to maintain social bonds and coordinate activity.  Now, new research from Project CETI, a nonprofit studying sperm whale communication, suggests shipping noise is changing the messages sperm whales are sending and may even be altering what they receive, according to National Geographic. 

Think of it as how you would talk to a friend at a super noisy party—not only would you have to talk louder, you might also limit your conversation to essentials instead of having an in-depth conversation. David Gruber, founder and CEO of Project CETI (the Cetacean Translation Initiative) and a National Geographic Explorer, who co-authored the new study, thinks this may be what’s happening among sperm whales. 

His team analyzed more than 1,000 vocalizations recorded from 15 whales over four years in the eastern Caribbean, and found that when ship noise was present, the whales both shortened and switched the codas they use. Furthermore, National Geographic reports that CETI scientists have identified two vowel-like codas in sperm whale communication, longer a-codas that resemble our a’s, and shorter i-codas analogous to how we say the vowel i. The team found that when there was shipping noise, the whales switched to a-codas.

The question is whether the whales were “talking” about the ships or adapting to their presence so they could be heard, Gruber told the Guardian. We don’t yet know, but the finding shows that noise pollution is causing animals to change their tune, which could send a loud and clear message to humans to put a sock in it.

The study was published in the journal Ecological Informatics.