Phytoplankton Population Drops 40 Percent Since 1950 (2010)

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/phytoplankton-population/

by yusufaytas • 7 years ago

138 56 7 years ago

jes5199• 7 years ago

Are we doomed? It seems like we might be doomed

I'd guess like any environment if the species population (humans) exceeds the carrying capacity of the land (earth) then there will be a die back.

NeedMoreTea2• 7 years ago

TL;DR: Yup, we're doomed.

Read or listen to David Wallace-Wells' Uninhabitable Earth[1] and/or Jem Bendell's Deep Adaptation[2] and decide for yourself. Both a couple of years old, neither will leave you the slightest bit optimistic.

[1] http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-...

[2] https://jembendell.com/category/deep-adaptation/

ridewinter7• 7 years ago

Earth has always been uninhabitable for the most part. It’s only technology that allows us to live where we are (unless you live in the great Rift Valley). And it will be technology that saves us in the future.

Edit: downvoted for technology optimism on this site?? Please explain.

geedy4• 7 years ago

David Wallace wells isn't your best source. His work has been criticized for misrepresenting the science by many reputable climate scientists, many of which are easy to find online. It is clear in his response to being called too alarmist that he chooses to stretch the truth.

Whether or not his tactic is ethical is worth debate perhaps, but whether his picture is reflective of what climate scientists believe is an answered question (its not). The situation is bad, but we need not become defeatist, lest we give up entirely.

ridewinter7• 7 years ago

No, we’ve been on the brink of annihilation many times and have found a way through. We cannot predict what new knowledge will be discovered to solve these problems. But we must keep trying.

rosybox• 7 years ago

When have we been on the brink of annihilation before?

coldtea4• 7 years ago

Not at all, handwaving, technological breakthroughs, handwaving, renewables, handwaving, mars colonies, and we'll be alright...

mietek• 7 years ago

(2010)

pygy_• 7 years ago

[2010], here's the paper referenced in the article: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature09268

I knew we had fucked up the oceans with plastics and overfishing, but I didn't know that phytoplankton was down as well, at such a scale. Per TFA, it provided 50% of the Earth's photosynthesis (in 2010). If it kept on dwindling that fast, that share is even lower now (down ~45%, with a half-life of 81 years, assuming the decline was constant between 1950 and 2010). This is also freaky knowing that it is the base of the food chain in the oceans...

I don't have any idea of the amount of oxygen that's cycled each year vs the total amount in the atmosphere... I suppose there's no immediate danger on that end, even if it were to drop to an even lower point before recovering, otherwise we'd have heard of this more often...

Gibbon1• 7 years ago

I keep coming back to the idea that over fishing --> pulling micro nutrients from the ocean --> plankton collapse.

hanniabu3• 7 years ago

Not only that, but the oceans are already at capacity with CO2 absorption and now with the plankton collapse the oxygenation of the ocean is also being reduced. The entire ocean ecosystem is going to suffocate, species after species.

pvaldes3• 7 years ago

Plankton is collapsing all the time in fact. Then they recover extremely fast.

koboll• 7 years ago

The really scary part is that phytoplankton produce 50-85% of the oxygen on Earth.

Unfortunately, steadily declining populations of oceanic microorganisms don't pack the same kind of viral social media star power Brazilian forest fires do.

mikro2nd• 7 years ago

Plastics and overfishing are the least of our worries (though not to be dismissed) -- we know how to stop those (though we might find the means to do so unpalatable).

The elephant in the room (whale in the fish pond?) is ocean acidification which will continue to increase for at least a century or so even if we stop using any and all fossil fuels immediately (and how likely does that look?)

titzer3• 7 years ago

Anything that causes mass die-offs that lead to loss of biodiversity is a cause for major concern. The system can be forced to crash multiple different ways. Currently it looks like the warm water heat waves have been killing corals en masse, which leads to collapse of shallow-water ecosystems, which is pancaking everything else. But plastics and overfishing are body blows being delivered at the same time as jabs and uppercuts.

Make no mistake, everything is interconnected. The recent uptick in gray whales dying off with signs that look like starvation is absolutely connected to the loss of coral reefs worldwide.

We need an all-front defense of the oceans, and I don't think we should pick winners or ignore major, major problems as somehow "solved" in our imaginations.

schainks• 7 years ago

Are there any teams trying to genetically engineer phytoplankton to deal with these changes in ocean conditions?

flyGuyOnTheSly2• 7 years ago

Who is going to pay them to do that extremely expensive work?

I really wish I never had to even think of that question, but it is a serious one.

Capitalism certainly has it's drawbacks...

geedy4• 7 years ago

I am not associated with any of the following, but there are organizations attempting to build devices that will bring colder, nutrient rich waters to the surface to cause phytoplankton blooms (or use the same nutrients for seaweed farming):

1) ocean-based.com 2) http://www.climatefoundation.org/

We should of course do everything we can to stop emitting carbon. But projects like these may an important part in our future.

flyGuyOnTheSly2• 7 years ago

I don't think it's the carbon dioxide that is killing the phytoplankton, they probably love it like most plants love a little extra CO2.

I imagine it's other chemicals like herbicides making their way into the oceans and killing the tiny plants.

geedy4• 7 years ago

The general problem is that the warmer waters are trapping the cooler waters below. Upwelling is an attempt to fix it!

tedivm2• 7 years ago

A little extra CO2 sure, but the rising CO2 in the oceans is actually changing the PH balance.

https://news.mit.edu/2015/ocean-acidification-phytoplankton-...

petre• 7 years ago

It's the temperature, not the CO2. I have fresh water shrimp and some fish. If you raise the temperature over 30°C, less oxygen dissolves into the water and there's not enough for the critters to breathe. It's basically asphyxiation. Labyrinth fish are adapted, since they can breathe air as well, but they do it merely for survival, they too become stressed and die after a while. Also some types of algae grow faster when the water is warmer. More algae = more O2 uptake during daytime.

chiefalchemist• 7 years ago

The tiny organisms, known as phytoplankton, also gobble up carbon dioxide to produce half the world's oxygen output—equaling that of trees and plants on land.

So does this mean there's been a significant drop in oxygen (produced)? And if so, how much?

If 100% of phytoplankton produces 50% of the oxygen and 100% is now 60% that mean 50% of oxygen is down to 30%. In other words, sans a drop in non phytoplankton, total oxygen that was 100% is not 80%?

Wouldn't we feel that?

tedivm2• 7 years ago

That's oxygen produced, not oxygen total. Dropping to 80% yearly production isn't going to remove the already stockpiled oxygen in the system, so how quickly we notice is going to depend on how much oxygen is being "removed" from the system at the same time.

From a different paper-

Oxygen concentrations are currently declining at roughly 19 per meg per year, or about 4 ppm per year. One "per meg" indicates one molecule out of 1,000,000 oxygen molecules, or roughly one molecule in 4.8 million molecules of air.

mirimir• 7 years ago

Total atmospheric oxygen is 195000 ppm, so 4 ppm isn't much. But if it's a consistent trend, it is a little concerning.

soperj• 7 years ago

Wouldn't this also mean the amount of CO2 processed was also down significantly?

hanniabu3• 7 years ago

That's pretty amazing, so in essence losing 40% of the phyloplankton is like us losing 50% of all trees over the last 50 years without even realizing it.

JoeSamoa• 7 years ago

Alot more is going to happen without us realizing it unless we take action fast...

https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/5/1/316

pvaldes3• 7 years ago

The idea of a study covering all oceans to find if "phytoplancton" (thousands of species) is vanishing is just ridiculously difficult. There are strong stationalities, different for each species. There are competition and predation, there are different water masses... In the same zone you can find void areas and reunion areas.

You would need huge resources and deploy a really fine "mesh" of stations for a very long time to study that.

Is the job of oceanographers, and do this all the time at local small scale. But extrapolating to a global scale is a really ambitious project, prone to came with the wrong answers.

Not to mention that aren't even doing plankton taxonomy. Is a collection of secchi disks data. To point to just one of the major problems with the study, Secchi disks aren't used at night normally. Let suppose that we would visit google headquarters at 4am for example, we could wrongly assume that is a mostly deserted area. Is the same problem.

qwerty456127• 7 years ago

Not in the lakes near me. These are so damn green right now...

mistrial9• 7 years ago

rumors of this were spread in certain environmentalist communities in the late 1980s, with less certainty, and were widely accompanied by dread, sorrow and a feeling of being overwhelmed. The gut-sense was that toxics, plastics, human activity and at that time, missing ozone layer, had broken or was about to break, some balance point in the top few feet of saltwater, where a huge amount of the vital activity lie.

Now, thirty years later, the ability to measure and predict is much greater, such that science literature can put a finer point on things. Yet the overall pollution activity (minus the success of the ozone layer repletion, worse with single-use plastics) continues.

Like the therapist says, you own your reaction to this.. hard to dismiss...

patientplatypus• 7 years ago

You know there are a lot of people who think we're going to die from global warming but I always figured the food web will just collapse. Like one year all the harvests stop working. Could be the missing bees and insects or the soil exhaustion or the heat. Or just that plastic is in the water supply. Heck, we just found out a few days ago that larger amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere actually makes rice less nutritious. But by then the reasons won't matter and people will just start killing each other over food.

titzer3• 7 years ago

I always figured the food web will just collapse.

I fear this too, but it won't be so dramatic. On geologic and evolutionary timescales, it will be like a flash. On human timescales, it might be a decade or a century. From our perspective it will look a lot more like a ratcheting-down of the food web, as loss of biodiversity will lead to pancaking of layers down. There will be booms and busts, as the ecological niche filled by one organism is vacated by its sudden collapse and a temporary resurgence of some aggressive species fills that gap, until that poorly adapted monoculture succumbs to something else. In a sense, the whole thing is going to come down in spasms, and we'll be arguing the whole way into the grave, because it's so complicated that gaslighters and deniers will always be able to point to something that looks like recovery, but really isn't.

I am long past accepting this. The question in my mind is really, how big is the crater left by humanity going to be?

algaeontoast• 7 years ago

This should be more troubling than dwindling forest and marshland.

radford-neal• 7 years ago

The referenced paper is from 2010. Do you suppose that the reason you haven't been hearing more about this recently is that it's just wrong?

In 2011, this comment disputing it was published:

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature09950

The paper was discussed on HN earlier, as part of the discussion of

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19127911

I have a comment there pointing out that if you actually look at the data in the paper, there is really no evidence of a decline.

strainer• 7 years ago

The authors of the 2010 paper did follow up with another in 2014[1] so "heard nothing since disputed in 2011 - its just wrong" is at least, inaccurate.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S007966111...

This work builds upon an earlier analysis (Boyce et al., 2010) by taking published criticisms into account, and by using recalibrated data, and novel analysis methods.

philipkglass• 7 years ago

Good counterpoint. I upvoted you and radford-neal.

Having looked at both papers now, I think that the 2014 followup confirmed the direction of the trend (downward), but it looks like it also significantly reduced the magnitude of the trend.

Look at figure 2b in the 2010 paper and figure 1a in the 2014 paper. They both show "Rate of Chl change (mg m–3 yr–1)" on a grid of cells covering the world's oceans. But the scale in the 2010 paper went from -0.40 to 0.40. In the 2014 paper the extremes of the scale are only -0.10 and 0.10. It looks like re-analysis indicated less dramatic rates of change both in the cells showing increase and those showing decrease.

hkai• 7 years ago

But climate change alarmism sells so well.

eklavyaa• 7 years ago

coincidentally I watched Our Planet High Seas episode today. They showed how crucial Phytoplankton is. No matter where you are in world the air you are breathing is somewhere coming from these microscopic plants. This fact made me stop and think even these tiny organisms contributing to make earth habitable, What we do as human beings ?

Phytoplankton Population Drops 40 Percent Since 1950 (2010)

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