Dilip Simeon's blog

Plastic has long had the planet in its grip. All too often it is found piled up on beaches and floating as "plastic islands" in the ocean . But it also clogs the stomachs of birds and other animals, and has even made it into the human bloodstream. To date, just 9% of the world's plastic has been recycled . Some 12% has been burned, and the rest has ended up on landfills or in nature. But as dire as the situation sounds, there is light at the end of the plastic tunnel, writes intergovernmental economic organization, the OECD, in its new Global Plastic Outlook report. If countries around the world make a concerted effort.... https://www.dw.com/en/solutions-to-the-plastic-crisis-microplastics-oceans/a-62017738 Tobacco industry severely damages environment: WHO Smoking not only kills people, but also severely impacts the environment , the World Health Organization said in a report released Tuesday. The report, Tobacco: poisoning our planet, published to coincide with World No...

Global heating is causing such a drastic change to the world’s oceans that it risks a mass extinction event of marine species that rivals anything that’s happened in the Earth’s history over tens of millions of years, new research has warned. Accelerating climate change is causing a “profound” impact upon ocean ecosystems that is “driving extinction risk higher and marine biological richness lower than has been seen in Earth’s history for the past tens of millions of years”, according to the study. The world’s seawater is  steadily climbing in temperature  due to the extra heat produced from the burning of fossil fuels, while oxygen levels in the ocean are plunging and the water is acidifying from the soaking up of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This means the oceans are overheated, increasingly  gasping for breath  – the volume of ocean waters completely depleted of oxygen has  quadrupled since the 1960s  – and becoming more hostile to life. Aquatic...

Across the Arctic, strange things are happening to the landscape. Massive lakes, several square miles in size, have disappeared in the span of a few days. Hillsides slump. Ice-rich ground collapses, leaving the landscape wavy where it once was flat, and in some locations creating vast fields of large, sunken polygons. It’s evidence that permafrost, the long-frozen soil below the surface, is thawing. That’s bad news for the communities built above it – and for the global climate. As an  ecologist , I study these dynamic landscape interactions and have been documenting the various ways permafrost-driven landscape change has accelerated over time. The hidden changes underway there hold warning for the future. Permafrost is perennially frozen soil that covers  about a quarter of the land  in the Northern Hemisphere, particularly in Canada, Russia and Alaska. Much of it is rich with the organic matter of long-dead plants and animals frozen in time. These frozen soils maintai...

The ocean is often seen as the last wild frontier: a vast and empty blue wilderness where waves, whales and albatrosses rule. This is no longer true. Unnoticed by many, a new industrial revolution is unfolding in our seas. The last several decades have seen  exponential growth  in new marine industries. This includes expansion of offshore oil and gas, but also exponential growth of offshore renewables, such as wind and tidal energy. Aquaculture, or farming underwater, is one of the  world’s fastest growing food sectors . Fishing occurs across  more than half of our ocean . More than  1m km  of undersea data cables crisscross the high seas. And our ocean highways carry about  1,600%  more cargo on ships than they did in the 1980s…. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/mar/15/as-the-ocean-industrial-revolution-gains-pace-the-need-for-protection-is-urgent A floating device created to clean up plastic from the ocean is finally doing its job ...

Superbly clear images of the shipwreck Endurance, 3,000 metres below the ocean’s surface in Antarctica’s Weddell Sea, were this week broadcast around the world. Found by the Endurance 22 Expedition using a state-of-the-art autonomous underwater vehicle, we now have images almost as iconic as those taken of the stricken ship by Australian photographer and expedition member Frank Hurley in 1915. Endurance was the ship of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. Led by British-Irish explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton, the expedition aimed to cross Antarctica on foot for the first time, from the Weddell Sea (south of the Atlantic Ocean) to the Ross Sea (south of New Zealand), via the South Pole. Voyages of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. Red, voyage of Endurance; yellow, drift of Endurance in pack ice; green, sea ice drift after sinking of Endurance; blue, voyage of James Caird; cyan, planned trans-Antarctic route; orange, voyage of Aurora; pink, retreat of Aurora; brown, supply depot...

A breeding colony of 60 million fish has been discovered in Antarctica's ice-covered Weddell Sea -- a unique and previously unknown ecosystem that covers an area the size of Malta. The fascinating find shows how little is known about the ocean depths. The vast colony, believed to be the world's largest, is home to the remarkable icefish (Neopagetopsis ionah), which has a see-through skull and transparent blood. Icefish are the only vertebrates to have no red blood cells. To survive at such low temperatures, it has evolved an anti-freeze protein in its transparent blood that stops ice crystals from growing.  The breeding colony was discovered in February 2021 by the German polar research vessel Polarstern, which was surveying the seabed about half a kilometer below the ship. It used a car-sized camera system attached to the stern of the ship that transmits pictures up to the deck as it's being towed… https://edition.cnn.com/2022/01/13/world/icefish-colony-discovery-scn/ind...

I was fortunate to play a small part in a new study, just published in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, which shows that the Earth broke yet another heat record last year. Twenty-three scientists from around the world teamed up to analyze thousands of temperature measurements taken throughout the world’s oceans. The measurements, taken at least 2,000 meters (about 6,500ft) deep and spread across the globe, paint a clear picture: the Earth is warming, humans are the culprit, and the warming will continue indefinitely until we collectively take action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. We used measurements from the oceans because they are absorbing the vast majority of the heat associated with global warming. In fact, more than 90% of global warming heat ends up in the oceans. I like to say that “global warming is really ocean warming”. If you want to know how fast climate change is happening, the answer is in the oceans… https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan...

The advent of cheap, versatile plastics has created “a global scale deluge of plastic waste seemingly everywhere we look”, the report states, with the US a leading contributor of disposable plastics that ends up entangling and choking marine life, harming ecosystems and bringing harmful pollution up through the food chain. Plastic waste has increased sharply in the US since 1960, with the country now generating about 42m metric tons of plastic waste a year, amounting to about 130kg of waste for every person in America. This total is more than all European Union member countries combined. The overall amount of municipal waste created in the US is also two to eight times greater than comparable countries around the world, the report found… https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/dec/01/deluge-of-plastic-waste-us-is-worlds-biggest-plastic-polluter Nurdles: the worst toxic waste you’ve probably never heard of When the X-Press Pearl container ship caught fire and sank in the Indian O...

Sunil Kandar, Ghoramara Island, India: I live in the Hatkhola locality of Ghoramara. I remember how on this island, during my childhood, I had a very happy and enjoyable life. We had a big mud-walled house. We also had large farmland of our own where rice and other vegetables grew. We sold a big part of our farm produce in the market. Like some other families in the island we were pretty rich. The farmland owned by our family was our biggest strength. Our island is located at the mouth of a river coming from the north. The northern edge of the island began sinking bit by bit under the river water when I was a child. Then, 20 or 25 years ago, the sea began eating away land around the southern edge of the island where we lived.  Ghoramara began going underwater  almost from all sides and the island began shrinking fast. Farmlands and houses of the people are constantly going underwater. Cyclones are pounding our island more frequently in recent years. The fragile island...

Trillions of metallic nodules on the sea floor could help stop global heating, but mining them may damage ocean ecology   In a display cabinet in the recently opened Our  Broken Planet exhibition  in London’s Natural History Museum, curators have placed a small nugget of dark material covered with faint indentations. The blackened lump could easily be mistaken for coal. Its true nature is much more intriguing, however. The nugget is a polymetallic nodule and oceanographers have discovered trillions of them litter Earth’s ocean floors. Each is rich in manganese, nickel, cobalt and copper, some of the most important ingredients for making the electric cars, wind turbines and solar panels that we need to replace the carbon-emitting lorries, power plants and factories now wrecking our climate. These metallic morsels could therefore help humanity save itself from the  ravages of global warming,  argue mining companies who say their extraction should be rated a...

More than a billion sea creatures across the Pacific north-west perished in this year’s heatwave. And it’s just a taste of what’s to come.    When forecasts foreshadowed the Pacific north-west’s devastating heatwave at the end of June, marine biologist Christopher Harley was alarmed and intrigued. Then came the smell, and his feelings somberly shifted. 33 billion pounds of plastic enter the ocean every year: the amount will TRIPLE by 2040 “It was this putrid smell of decay,” Harley said. Across hundreds of miles of coastline the extreme heat baked the barnacles, seaweed, and small sea creatures exposed to the elements along the shore. Starfish that failed to crawl to shadier spots were cooked alive. Mussels laid agape along the rocks, the tissue crisped between their shells.... https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jul/31/global-heating-climate-crisis-animals-water-crops Oceana.org A floating device created to clean up plastic from the ocean is finally doing its job, ...

A huge trash-collecting system designed to clean up plastic floating in the Pacific Ocean is finally picking up plastic, its inventor announced Wednesday. The Netherlands-based nonprofit  the Ocean Cleanup says its latest prototype  was able to capture and hold debris ranging in size from huge, abandoned fishing gear, known as "ghost nets," to tiny microplastics as small as 1 millimeter. "Today, I am very proud to share with you that we are now catching plastics," Ocean Cleanup founder and CEO Boyan Slat said at a news conference in Rotterdam. The Ocean Cleanup system is a U-shaped barrier with a net-like skirt that hangs below the surface of the water. It moves with the current and collects faster moving plastics as they float by. Fish and other animals will be able to swim beneath it. The new prototype added a parachute anchor to slow the system and increased the size of a cork line on top of the skirt to keep the plastic from washing over it…. https://edition.c...

Salps are jelly-like sea creatures, so humble that few people even know they exist. But there are countless numbers of them swimming in the world’s oceans and they help fight climate change. Salps cruise around the sea surface at night, sucking up and digesting phytoplankton, microscopic plant-like organisms that absorb CO2 for their photosynthesis. During the day, the salps sink deeper in the sea, possibly to avoid predators, and squirt out unusually heavy droppings rich in carbon left over from their phytoplankton meals. The pellets sink rapidly, up to 1,000 metres deep in a day, and faster than the pellets of most other sea creatures. And when the salp dies, its body also sinks rapidly, sending even more carbon to the ocean depths.  According to  a study  published last year, salps,  jellyfish  and other gelatinous creatures such as comb jellies remove up to an estimated 6.8bn tonnes of carbon each year from seas around the world. Of that, some 2bn tonne...