Web links on the subject of ocean upwelling

• US gov. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration  

• Griffith University, Queensland, Brian Kirke Enhancing fish stocks with wave-powered artificial upwelling     

 This has some very practical suggestions for the most effective and economical methods of pumping

• Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute OCB program Ocean Fertilzation  

 Very brief but shows examples of simple wave powered uplifting tubes
             Nitrogen fixation-enhanced carbon sequestration in low nitrate, low chlorophyll seascapes
             This is one of the links in Woods Hole OCB document

• Artificial Upwelling ... using the Perpetual Salt Fountain  

Must be downloaded as a .pdf file. The 'perpetual Salt Fountain' is an experimentally verified flow of cold deep water *up* a pipe, driven by the lesser salinity of water within the pipe because the salinity of the surface water is higher, due to its higher temperature enabling more salt to be dissolved. 

The system obviously has to be primed by cold water being sucked/pumped into the tube first but thereafter it seems that the upwards flow will continue indefinitely.  [To me that is counter intuitive but that of course is why they were doing the experiment.]

       

• Artificial Upwelling and Mixing (AUMIX) 

Simple and straightforward experiment in wave powered AU in progress off Hawaii; it works.

Dr Sylvia Earl - what to do about the loss of fish populations

I just today heard a session on ABC Radio National featuring an interview with Dr Sylvia Earl who has been studying the ocean for many decades. It was fascinating to hear and it was quite salutary to hear how in the 1960s and '70s   Dr Earl was having to push to get herself included on expeditions just because she was a woman.

One thing that worried me though is I heard nothing from Dr Earl or the interviewer, etc, about actually feeding the fish! Dr Earl described how so many regions of the ocean and the rivers flowing into it have been irrevocably changed by human plundering and polluting. One suggestion offered was to stop eating fish.   Well I have to say I cannot bear that thought.

What we need to do is Feed the Fish!  

This can only be done on a scale large enough to be useful if we, the human beings of this planet, start drawing up nutrient rich water from the ocean bottom. 

• Remember folks: In the Ocean -- Shit Sinks

That is why all the good stuff that ocean plants need is down there, four kilometres below, hidden away from the sun light so neither the planktons nor the multicellular plants can get at it. 

But we can! We can bring it up to the surface.

Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion

I have been trying to draw some diagrams to explain what I think we should be doing. I will scan these and post them here in the next day or so.
Meanwhile, here is a link to similar minded thinking displayed on Wikipedia.
Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion

• A thing to remember is that none of this is rocket science!
  This is all doable with technology already available and very well understood.   
• As the Wikipedia article shows, this is a 'base load' technology; it will just hum along in the background for ever and a day. This power source will keep insulated ice in a frozen, solid, less-dense-than-seawater, state for hundreds if not thousands of years. 

Notice that the authors of the article are pointing to all the things I have mentioned in the description in the side panel at the right hand side of this blog page

Society for the Reversal of Ocean Acidification & Creation of Ocean Havens

I have never done anything like this before but it is becoming clear to me that the only way to get this project under way is to act as if it is already happening.

The

  Society for the Reversal of Ocean Acidification and Creation of Ocean Havens, 

is hereby proclaimed.

The acronym for that would seem to be SoROACOH which could be pronounced in a manner close to the name of  Sirocco, the dry wind from the Sahara which blows into southern Europe.  Non native speakers of English might want to pronounce the "A" sound as well. Of course anybody who participates might want to improve on the name; such suggestions will be welcome. Note, my daughter Gwyneth vetoed ".. Creation of Ocean Cities"  on the grounds that bogans [= persons with more time than wits on hand] would add a "K" to the end of the initials. She is probably right.

Cheers

The Last Great Global Warming - article in Scientific American Magazine

The July 2011 issue of Scientific American Magazine contains an article describing what is now known about  a period of global warming that occurred about 56 million years ago.

During that period:

"in the course of a few thousand years—a mere instant in geologic time—global temperatures rose five degrees Celsius, marking a planetary fever known to scientists as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, or PETM.

 "Climate zones shifted toward the poles, on land and at sea, forcing plants and animals to migrate, adapt or die. Some of the deepest realms of the ocean became acidified and oxygen-starved, killing off many of the organisms living there. It took nearly 200,000 years for the earth’s natural buffers to bring the fever down."

 

 Image: Illustration by Ron Miller [from the magazine]

The article's author Lee R. Kump  describes how the researchers went to the island of Spitsbergen in the Svalbard archipelago within the Arctic circle to retrieve drill core samples saved from earlier exploration work done during commercial mineral exploration. These sediment samples contained material which had been deposited throughout the PETM period and which had since been undisturbed underground until the drillers arrived.

What the deposits revealed, in summary, is that 

• "Global temperature rose five degrees Celsius 56 million years ago in response to a massive injection of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
• That intense gas release was only 10 percent of the rate at which heat-trapping greenhouse gases are building up in the atmosphere today.
• The speed of today’s rise is more troubling than the absolute magnitude, because adjusting to rapid climate change is very difficult."

The fossils in the mineral records indicate that absorption of carbon dioxide by the ocean caused significant acidification which happened then much slower than is happening now. Even so, something like 30 percent of all species of ocean flora and fauna die out.

"[the] evidence suggests the pace of Earth's most abrupt prehistoric warm-up paled in comparison with what we face today. The episode has lessons for our future."

Richard A Feely interview about ocean acidification on ABC Radio National - 'National Interest' program

If you download the whole edition of the "In the National Interest" program, Richard Feely starts at about 29th minute and goes for about 10mins.

Study of ocean acidification using natural volcanic C02 seeps

Another study - reported on the Physorg website - predicting the demise of coral reefs; a longer time-frame here: they say the die off may occur at the end of 21st Century
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-05-ocean-acidification-diversity-resiliency-coral.html

that article's source listed as:
"Losers and winners in coral reefs acclimatized to elevated carbon dioxide concentrations," Nature Climate Change, June 2011.