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The Garbage we’ve dumped in the Oceans is coming back to us : From India to the Arctic, our Ocean Currents are changing
by Open-Publishing - Tuesday 12 February 2008http://www.chycho.com/?q=node/1574
“A team of NASA and university scientists has detected an ongoing reversal in Arctic Ocean circulation triggered by atmospheric circulation changes that vary on decade-long time scales. The results suggest not all the large changes seen in Arctic climate in recent years are a result of long-term trends associated with global warming...
“The team of scientists found a 10-millibar decrease in water pressure at the bottom of the ocean at the North Pole between 2002 and 2006, equal to removing the weight of 10 centimeters (four inches) of water from the ocean. The distribution and size of the decrease suggest that Arctic Ocean circulation changed from the counterclockwise pattern it exhibited in the 1990s to the clockwise pattern that was dominant prior to 1990.”
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Reading this story reminded me of the following picture from the July 12 “Day in Picture” series from the BBC. The caption reads: “For the last week, the sea around Juhu beach in Mumbai, India, has been churning out more than 300 tones of rubbish every day because of changes in sea currents and waves.”
click to enlarge - source
When I showed this picture to a dear friend, she stated, “just imagine how much garbage we have dumped into the oceans and how much of that will be washing onto our shores in the future? Not a very good legacy to leave for our children.” The following is a satellite image of a gyre off the coast of Japan, showing the possible location of a plastic waste vortex in the Pacific Ocean. This gives us a pretty good idea of what we can expect. Further information and an animated map of ocean currents showing the ‘Eastern Garbage Patch’ at “The trash vortex.”
click to enlarge - source
My friend also happened to point out the most important part of this report. “The ocean currents have changed, and the environmental implications are catastrophic.”
How serious are major changes in our ocean currents? According to the American Institute of Physics, “on our watery planet the climate is governed largely by the oceans. But for a long time, discussions of climate change did not take the oceans fully into account, simply because very little was known about them…In the 1980s, evidence from Greenland ice cores, supported by crude computer models, showed that the North Atlantic circulation could switch radically within a century or two (or maybe less). If global warming triggered such a switch, it would wreak dire harm.”
One place that could see major changes in its climate is Europe. In 2005, climate change researchers “detected the first signs of a slowdown in the Gulf Stream — the mighty ocean current that keeps Britain and Europe from freezing.
“They have found that one of the ‘engines’ driving the Gulf Stream — the sinking of supercooled water in the Greenland Sea — has weakened to less than a quarter of its former strength.”
The earth’s atmosphere and ocean currents are the most complex systems on this planet. We can not be certain of the ocean currents periodic time cycle, or how they will behave in the future. However we do know one thing for certain, any major changes in our atmospheric or ocean currents will have global consequences.