Mitchell - Seasick: the hidden ecological crisis of the global ocean

Alanna Mitchell is the author of the internationally acclaimed Dancing at the Dead Sea: Tracking the Worlds Environmental Hotspots. In 2000, while working at Canadas national newspaper The Globe and Mail, she was named the best environmental reporter in the world by the Reuters Foundation. The prize led her to be a visiting scholar at Oxford Universitys Green College. In her 17 years as a newspaper journalist, she has won three international reporting awards and several national awards for her work on social trends and finance. She is now a public speaker and independent writer living in Toronto, Canada.

First published in Australia in 2008 by Pier 9, an imprint of Murdoch Books Pty Ltd.
Second edition published in 2010.

Murdoch Books Australia
Pier 8/9
23 Hickson Road
Millers Point NSW 2000
Phone: +61 (0) 2 8220 2000
Fax: +61 (0) 2 8220 2558
www.murdochbooks.com.au

Murdoch Books UK Limited
Erico House, 6th Floor
9399 Upper Richmond Road
Putney, London SW15 2TG
Phone: +44 (0) 20 8785 5995
Fax: +44 (0) 20 8785 5985
www.murdochbooks.co.uk

Front cover image: Charlie Riedel/Associated Press
Back cover image: Tannen Maury/Corbis
Cover design: Vivien Valk
Internal design: Joanna Byrne
Design layout: Jo Yuen

Text copyright Alanna Mitchell 2008, 2010
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Design copyright Murdoch Books Pty Limited 2008

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical photocopying, recording or otherwise without prior permission of the publisher.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Author: Mitchell, Alanna.

Title: Seasick [electronic resource] : the hidden ecological crisis
of the global ocean / Alanna Mitchell.

ISBN: 9781742660479 (ebook : epub )

Subjects: Oceanography--Research.
Nature--Effect of human beings on.
Marine resources conservation.
Marine ecology.

Dewey Number: 333.9164

This book is for
James Kenneth Patterson
and his remarkable uncle
Kenneth Mark Drain

Tim Flannery was barefoot the evening I met him, pants rolled up to below his knees. It was dusk and we had found each other in the unlikely town of Whyalla, South Australia, where, it is said, the outback meets the sea.

Our meeting was sheer serendipity. The two of us had happened to fly into this remote town of 22,000 on the same plane the night before and he had been at meetings all day with the towns steelmaker, continuing his international tour de force of explaining global climate change to the public, business leaders and politicians.

His book The Weather Makers: How We Are Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth , Al Gores book and movie An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It , and the report by Sir Nicholas Stern, the former chief economist of the World Bank, on the financial consequences of ignoring climate change have been the one-two-three punch that has convinced the public that global climate change is more than, well, hot air.

Their combined effectin concert with Hurricane Katrinas devastating tear through New Orleans in August 2005has been remarkable. As I researched this book across five continents and over two and a half years, everyone I spoke with could pinpoint the moment that the public discourse changed from whether or not global climate change was real to what humanity needed to do about it: the third quarter of 2006, after the cumulative effect of Katrina, Flannery, Stern and Gore.

So Flannery, an Australian ecologist, is a hero to people like me who also write books about the environment. I had been hoping to meet him because he got it so right.

Plus, Flannery has done three things that other brilliant scientific minds rarely do: he has been able to put together an integrated picture of what the science is telling us, explain the implications of that big picture and then help people hear the story of those implications.

He is, in effect, a prophet who is taken seriously, who somehow happened to show up at the right time and be able to tell his story in the right way. A historically rare entity.

When we met he was longing to walk on the beach, so out we went to the sandy shore of the Spencer Gulf that runs in front of the Foreshore Motor Inn, Whyallas finest accommodation, where the steel company had put him up.

I talked and talked, telling him about this book, the stories of my travels around the world, the scientists I had met, the questions I still had, and, above all, why it matters so much to me that all the things I have found out become part of this new, informed public discourse for which he helped lay the groundwork.

I told him of my worries. The fate of the ocean has not had the same attention as the atmosphere. Yet the global ocean makes up 99 per cent of the living space on the planet, thanks to its immense depth. If you add up all the land surface and the narrow band of the atmosphere that supports creatures who breathe air, the total represents just 1 per cent of the areas where life can survive on the planet. The rest is in the ocean, covering more than seven-tenths of the earths surface.

Even more significant than the oceans breadth and width is its depth, or third dimension. That total volume, with its immense biological importance, is what I came to think of as the deeps, both the source of life and the future of life on the planet.

The issue is that all over the world ocean scientists, in groups of specialists who rarely put their information together, are finding that global climate change and other human actions are beginning to have a measurable effect on the ocean. The vital signs of this critical medium of life are showing clear signs of distress.

The great metaphor for this was the crude oil blowout in the Gulf of Mexico in the summer of 2010, by far the worlds biggest accidental spill of oil into the sea. Month after month that crude gushed into the water from a hole punched into the earths crust 1.5 kilometres below the sea surface, fouling birds, turtles, larvae and beaches, as we all watched to see just how bad it would get. It was like pressing fast-forward on a video of the oceans future. When the gush was finally stanched, more than four million barrels later, the lessons were clear. Finally, we were able to glimpse the invisible: the prospect of a fatally damaged sea, and our role in making it so.

What hasnt been said about the Gulf disaster, though, is thatheretical as it seemsall that crude oil may actually be less dangerous spewing into the water than if it were pumped to the surface and burned as normal. Thats because when we burn oil, gas and other fossil fuels, were putting carbon dioxide gas into the atmosphere. And that is harming the oceans ability to support life.

Roughly a third of the carbon dioxide that humans are putting into the atmosphere has entered the ocean. In addition, about 80 per cent of the extra heat being created by climate change has been absorbed by the ocean.

These two phenomenacarbon dioxide and heatare changing the oceans acidity, patterns of saltiness, temperature, volume, ice cover, function within the planets carbon and oxygen cycles, and possibly the physical structure of the currents as well. And these are just the ones we happen to know a bit about.

This change is happening all over the world. And this is having a profound effect on many of the creatures that live in the ocean. At the same time, our search for food from the sea has resulted in the removal of massive quantities of creatures from the global ocean. In itself, thats a problem. And its exacerbated by the changes were also causing through carbon dioxide and heat, because life in the sea helps regulate the seas physical and chemical properties. When we remove so much life, were also removing one of the ways in which the ocean can keep its systems stable.