Global marine analysis suggests food chain collapse – ‘There will be a species collapse from the top of the food chain down’

13 October 2015 (University of Adelaide) – A world-first global analysis of marine responses to climbing human CO2 emissions has painted a grim picture of future fisheries and ocean ecosystems. Published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), marine ecologists from the University of Adelaide say the expected ocean acidification […]

Tuna and mackerel populations suffer 74 percent decline over 40 years – ‘This is catastrophic. We are destroying vital food sources, and the ecology of our oceans.’

By Fiona Harvey15 September 2015 (The Guardian) – Tuna and mackerel populations have suffered a “catastrophic” decline of nearly three quarters in the last 40 years, according to new research. WWF and the Zoological Society of London found that numbers of the scombridae family of fish, which also includes bonito, fell by 74% between 1970 […]

Record ocean temperatures threaten Hawaii’s coral reefs – ‘Unless we change the way we live, the Earth’s coral reefs will be utterly destroyed within our children’s lifetimes’

By Jeff Masters  24 July 2015 (Weather Underground) – Record warm sea surface temperatures in Hawaii’s waters threaten to bring a second consecutive year of record coral bleaching to their precious coral reefs this summer. According to NOAA, ocean temperatures in the waters near and to the south of the Hawaiian Islands were 1 – […]

Campaign against plundering krill in the Southern Ocean

By Gary Farrow10 July 2015 (NZ Herald) – Sea Shepherd Australia has launched a new campaign to protect a species much smaller than the whales it has generally focused on, but just as important to the Southern Ocean ecosystem. Krill play a crucial role in the Antarctic food chain, as they are consumed by whales, […]

Pink salmon struggle as freshwater becomes acidic

By Niina Heikkinen and ClimateWire30 June 2015 (ClimateWire) – Pink salmon are providing researchers with sobering hints to how carbon dioxide-induced acidity could affect freshwater fish species by the end of the 21st century. A study published yesterday in Nature Climate Change showed that early exposure to high levels of CO2 during the larval stage […]

Scientists to analyze ‘the Blob’ at Scripps Oceanography Workshop

30 April 2015 (Scripps Institution) – A workshop on an unusually warm pool of North Pacific Ocean water and associated conditions will take place May 5 and 6 at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego. Participants in the 2014-2015 Pacific Anomalies Science and Technology Workshop will include federal, non-federal, state and local scientists and […]

Acidic oceans implicated in Earth's worst mass extinction – ‘These findings may help us understand the threat posed to marine life by modern-day ocean acidification’

By Will Dunham; Editing by Mohammad Zargham9 April 2015 WASHINGTON (Reuters) – It is one of science’s enduring mysteries: what caused the worst mass extinction in Earth’s history. And, no, it is not the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. Scientists said on Thursday that huge amounts of carbon dioxide spewed from colossal volcanic eruptions […]

CO2 emissions threaten seafood as ocean acidification spreads along U.S. coastlines – ‘We’re the canary in the coal mine for what’s happening with our shellfish industry. Conditions are going to get progressively worse.’

By Maria Gallucci23 February 2015 (IBT) – Taylor Shellfish Company was grappling with a crisis in the summer of 2009. Millions of oyster larvae were dying in its Washington hatcheries, and production had dropped by 80 percent. Down the coast, Oregon’s hatcheries faced the same problem. Highly acidic ocean water, it turned out, was dissolving […]

Ocean life faces mass extinction, broad study finds – ‘We may be sitting on a precipice of a major extinction event’

By Carl Zimmer15 January 2015 (The New York Times) – A team of scientists, in a groundbreaking analysis of data from hundreds of sources, has concluded that humans are on the verge of causing unprecedented damage to the oceans and the animals living in them. “We may be sitting on a precipice of a major […]

Scientists: Human activity has pushed Earth beyond four of nine ‘planetary boundaries’ – The planet ‘is likely to be much less hospitable to the development of human societies’

By Joel Achenbach 15 January 2015 (Washington Post) – At the rate things are going, the Earth in the coming decades could cease to be a “safe operating space” for human beings. That is the conclusion of a new paper published Thursday in the journal Science by 18 researchers trying to gauge the breaking points […]

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