Umberto Eco

But now I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

Umberto Eco

Elizabeth Taylor – Giant (1956 film)

Original Photograph by Frank Worth Photo | Prints available
Colorized by malakon on Reddit

Tina Fey

Emerson

My Hero...

Sea Change

Watch video

Ocean acidification, the lesser-known twin of climate change, threatens to scramble marine life on a scale almost too big to fathom.

Story by Craig Welch
Photographs by Steve Ringman
About project →

"Sea Change" was produced, in part, with funding from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

NORMANBY ISLAND, Papua New Guinea — Katharina Fabricius plunged from a dive boat into the Pacific Ocean of tomorrow.
She kicked through blue water until she spotted a ceramic tile attached to the bottom of a reef.
A year earlier, the ecologist from the Australian Institute of Marine Science had placed this small square near a fissure in the sea floor where gas bubbles up from the earth. She hoped the next generation of baby corals would settle on it and take root.
Fabricius yanked a knife from her ankle holster, unscrewed the plate and pulled it close. Even underwater the problem was clear. Tiles from healthy reefs nearby were covered with budding coral colonies in starbursts of red, yellow, pink and blue. This plate was coated with a filthy film of algae and fringed with hairy sprigs of seaweed.
Instead of a brilliant new coral reef, what sprouted here resembled a slimy lake bottom.
Isolating the cause was easy. Only one thing separated this spot from the lush tropical reefs a few hundred yards away.
Carbon dioxide.

Healthy reef: The colorful beginnings of a new reef sprout on a ceramic tile that was placed near healthy coral in Papua New Guinea. The baby corals and coralline algae on the tile provide a glimpse of the next-generation reef.

UNHEALTHY REEF: Algae and seaweed crowd out reef growth on a tile placed near Papua New Guinea’s CO₂ vents. The more corrosive water mirrors what’s expected throughout the world’s oceans near the end of this century.

In this volcanic region, pure CO₂ escapes naturally through cracks in the ocean floor. The gas bubbles alter the water’s chemistry the same way rising CO₂ from cars and power plants is quickly changing the marine world.
In fact, the water chemistry here is exactly what scientists predict most of the seas will be like in 60 to 80 years.
That makes this isolated splash of coral reef a chilling vision of our future oceans.

‘High rates of extinction’ to come?

Imagine every person on Earth tossing a hunk of CO₂ as heavy as a bowling ball into the sea. That’s what we do to the oceans every day.
Burning fossil fuels, such as coal, oil and natural gas, belches carbon dioxide into the air. But a quarter of that CO₂ then gets absorbed by the seas — eight pounds per person per day, about 20 trillion pounds a year.

Healthy reef: Fish swim around branching corals amid a pristine reef near Dobu Island, Papua New Guinea.

Unhealthy reef: Fabricius records data from instruments placed alongside corals in the CO₂ vents off Dobu Island.

Scientists once considered that entirely good news, since it removed CO₂ from the sky. Some even proposed piping more emissions to the sea.
But all that CO₂ is changing the chemistry of the ocean faster than at any time in human history. Now the phenomenon known as ocean acidification — the lesser-known twin of climate change — is helping push the seas toward a great unraveling that threatens to scramble marine life on a scale almost too big to fathom, and far faster than first expected.

Join the conversation

Ocean acidification could disrupt marine life on an almost unfathomable scale. What are your thoughts and reactions?
Post a comment →

Here’s why: When CO₂ mixes with water it takes on a corrosive power that erodes some animals’ shells or skeletons. It lowers the pH, making oceans more acidic and sour, and robs the water of ingredients animals use to grow shells in the first place.
Acidification wasn’t supposed to start doing its damage until much later this century.
Instead, changing sea chemistry already has killed billions of oysters along the Washington coast and at a hatchery that draws water from Hood Canal. It’s helping destroy mussels on some Northwest shores. It is a suspect in the softening of clam shells and in the death of baby scallops. It is dissolving a tiny plankton species eaten by many ocean creatures, from auklets and puffins to fish and whales — and that had not been expected for another 25 years.
And this is just the beginning.
Ocean acidification also can bedevil fish and the animals that eat them, including sharks, whales, seabirds and, of course, bigger fish. Shifting sea chemistry can cripple the reefs where fish live, rewire fish brains and attack what fish eat.
Those changes pose risks for our food, too, from the frozen fish sticks pulled from the grocer’s freezer to the fillets used in McDonald’s fish sandwiches, to the crab legs displayed at Pike Place Market, all brought to the world by a Northwest fishing industry that nets half the nation’s catch.
And this chemical change is not happening in a vacuum.

Island reefs of Papua New Guinea offer a window on our future, while fishing ports in Alaska and along the Washington coast show how the deterioration of food webs could strike close to home.

Globally, overfishing remains a scourge. But souring seas and ocean warming are expected to reduce even more of the plants and animals we depend on for food and income. The changes will increase ocean pests, such as jellyfish, and make the system more vulnerable to disasters and disease. The transformation will be well under way by the time today’s preschoolers reach middle age.
“I used to think it was kind of hard to make things in the ocean go extinct,” said James Barry of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California. “But this change we’re seeing is happening so fast it’s almost instantaneous. I think it might be so important that we see large levels, high rates, of extinction.”
Globally, we can arrest much of the damage if we bring down CO₂ soon. But if we do not, the bad news won’t stop. And the longer we wait, the more permanent the change gets.
“There’s a train wreck coming and we are in a position to slow that down and make it not so bad,” said Stephen Palumbi, a professor of evolutionary and marine biology at Stanford University. “But if we don’t start now the wreck will be enormous.”
You might think that would lend the problem urgency. So far, it has not.
Combined nationwide spending on acidification research for eight federal agencies, including grants to university scientists by the National Science Foundation, totals about $30 million a year — less than the annual budget for the coastal Washington city of Hoquiam, population 10,000.
The federal government has spent more some years just studying sea lions in Alaska.
So to understand how acidification could transform marine life, The Seattle Times crisscrossed the world’s greatest ocean, from the sun-dappled reefs of the South Pacific to the ice-encrusted surface of the Bering Sea.

How much carbon are we putting into the ocean?

We’re dumping the equivalent of a hopper car of coal — about 100 U.S. tons — into the ocean every second.

Mark Nowlin / The Seattle Times

Acidification will strike every ocean, and no one can predict exactly how things will look — the seas are too complex for that.
But the island reefs of Papua New Guinea’s Milne Bay province offer a window on our future, while fishing ports in Alaska and along the Washington coast show how damage to fish brains and the deterioration of food webs may strike close to home.

A disturbing glimpse of the future

Papua New Guinea’s Solomon Sea island vents are remarkable because of where they are: in shallow waters normally fringed by coral reefs as striking as fields of wildflowers.
These remnants of earthquakes or eruptions come in all shapes: mini-geysers, a giant crack that burps basketball-size blobs of gas, rows of pinprick holes in the sand that exhale curtains of Champagne bubbles.

Katharina Fabricius swims through carbon-dioxide bubbles off Papua New Guinea. The waters here offer a glimpse of how acidification is likely to transform the seas.

As Fabricius glided through earlier this year, a bleak portrait emerged.

At dusk on the upper deck of the M/V Chertan, biologist Anna Kluibenschedl, at microscope, documents marine life growing on a tile removed from the reef off Normanby Island. + Enlarge photo

Children help biologist Joy Smith cart plastic tubs of coral and sediment through the jungle on Normanby Island, Papua New Guinea. She is studying whether CO₂ might harm tiny animals at the bottom of the marine food chain. View photo gallery →

Instead of tiered jungles of branching, leafy reefs or a watery Eden of delicate corals arrayed in fans, she saw mud, stubby spires and squat boulder corals. Snails and clams were mostly gone, as were most of a reef’s usual residents: worms, colorful sea squirts and ornate feather stars.
The culprit: excess carbon dioxide. When CO₂ hits seawater it becomes carbonic acid — the same weak acid found in club soda — and releases hydrogen ions, reducing the water’s pH. This chemical change robs the water of carbonate ions, a critical building block for many marine organisms. Clams rely on that carbonate, as do corals, lobsters, shrimp, crabs, barnacles, sand dollars, cucumbers and sea urchins.
In Puget Sound, for example, 30 percent of marine life — some 600 species — draws upon carbonate ions to grow.
Reaction to high CO₂ varies by species. Acidification can kill baby abalone and some crabs, deform squid and weaken brittle stars while making it tough for corals to grow. It can increase sea grasses, which can be good, and boost the toxicity of red tides, which is not. It makes many creatures less resilient to heavy metal pollution.
Roughly a quarter of organisms studied by researchers actually do better in high CO₂. Another quarter seem unaffected. But entire marine systems are built around the remaining half of susceptible plants and animals.
“What does well in disturbed environments are invasive generalists,” said Ken Caldeira, a climate expert at Stanford’s Carnegie Institution for Science, who helped popularize the term ocean acidification. “The ones that do poorly are the more highly evolved specialists. Yes, there will be winners and losers, but the winners will mostly be the weeds.”
Many species, from sea urchins to abalone, have some capacity to adapt to high CO₂. But it’s not clear if they will have the time.

Featured comments

“What can I, as an individual with no money nor power, do to help stop this? I can reduce my energy use as far as possible. Apart from the online stuff I’m pretty low CO₂. I can reduce, reuse, and recycle. (I need to get better at that.) But what else can I do?”

— DanBC

“We never talk about giving up our GAS-POWERED vehicles. If we don’t change our ways we can’t whine about the consequences.”

— Debrah Jordan

Read all comments →

“It’s almost like an arms race,” said Gretchen Hofmann, a marine biologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “We can see that the potential for rapid evolution is there. The question is, will the changes be so rapid and extreme that it will outstrip what they’re capable of?”
That is the underlying problem: The pace of change has caught everyone off guard.
Already, the oceans have grown 30 percent more acidic since the dawn of the industrial revolution — 15 percent just since the 1990s. By the end of this century, scientists predict, seas may be 150 percent more acidic than they were in the 18th century.
The oceans are corroding faster than they did during past periods of marine extinctions that were linked to souring seas. Even 55 million years ago, the rate of change was 10 times slower than today. The current shift has come so quickly that scientists five years ago saw chemical changes off the West Coast not expected for half a century.
And the seas are souring even faster in some places.
The Arctic and Antarctic have shifted more rapidly than other waters around the world because deep, cold seas absorb more CO₂. The U.S. West Coast has simply seen consequences sooner because strong winds draw its CO₂-rich water to the surface where vulnerable shellfish live.

A worker harvests oysters from the Nisbet family’s Goose Point Oyster Co. in Willapa Bay. After ocean acidification started killing billions of baby oysters along Washington’s coast, both in the wild and in hatcheries where the Nisbets bought their oyster seed, the family took a radical step. They opened a hatchery in Hawaii. View photo gallery →

Sea chemistry in the Northwest already is so bad during some windy periods that it kills young oysters in Washington’s Willapa Bay. In less than 40 years, half the West Coast’s surface waters are expected to be that corrosive every day.
That threatens to reduce the variety of life in the sea.
“That loss of biodiversity should matter to people just like a lack of diversity in your stock portfolio should bother people,” said Jeremy Mathis, an oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “It works exactly the same way. If you go all-in on one stock and that stock crashes, you’re stuck.”
Katharina Fabricius sees plenty of reason to worry.
In six trips to Papua New Guinea, she found sea cucumbers and urchins living near the vents, but the shrimp and crab she expected to see instead were almost nonexistent. She saw only 60 percent as many hard corals as she did on healthy reefs nearby. Only 8 percent as many soft corals survived, and one species dominated. The reefs that remained were less intricate, offering fewer places for animals to hide. Dull, rounded boulder corals, which seemed to thrive, still grew a third slower than normal. Sea grasses flourished but were less diverse. There was twice as much fleshy algae.

Biologists Sam Noonan, left, and Miwa Takahashi collect sea grass in Papua New Guinea. Sea grasses, which are expected to increase as the ocean becomes more acidic, grow far faster near the CO₂ vents.+ Enlarge photo

“We’re seeing sea-grass meadows as green as golf lawns,” Fabricius said. “But corals are suffering, and they are incredibly important.”
Corals protect shorelines from erosion and severe weather and provide a dormitory where staggering varieties of life seek shelter. Those tiny plants and animals then become food for other creatures. Study after study shows the same thing — the more reefs collapse and fleshy algae spreads, the less we see of important tropical fish: wrasses, tangs, damselfish, parrotfish.
Those losses come at a price.
One-sixth of animal protein consumed by humans comes from marine fish — in some cultures nearly all of it. The vast majority of wild seafood is fish, and fish account for three-quarters of the money made from ocean catches.
Yet reefs are just the first of many ways ocean-chemistry shifts could hit seafood.
Scientists once thought fish would dodge the worst direct effects of acidification. Now it appears that might be wrong — a fact researchers learned almost by accident.

Losing Nemo: Fish harmed, with deadly results

In 2007, American biologist Danielle Dixson arrived in Papua New Guinea hoping to find out how Nemo got home.
Clownfish live in waggling anemones near coral reefs, often near islands. Scientists suspected they traced their way through the sea by following their noses. But how?

Clownfish swim through an anemone near Dobu Island, Papua New Guinea. CO₂ can alter how clownfish see, hear and smell, which increases the chance of death.

Solving this riddle would help uncover one of acidification’s most haunting problems: its ability to scramble fish behavior.
Dixson, then a graduate student at Australia’s James Cook University, wanted to find the olfactory cue that drew clownfish back to the reef. She tested smells from different water. She tested dirt. Nothing was quite right, until she looked up.

Biologist Jodie Rummer dissects a fish she caught at one of the carbon-dioxide vent sites off Papua New Guinea as part of her effort to understand how or if chemically altered water affects fish.+ Enlarge photo

Since Papua New Guinea’s island rain forests drape over the sea, Dixson took five island plants and spread the scent of their leaves in water. Young clownfish immediately swam toward the smell.
Back in Australia, she prepared to repeat the experiment in a lab. There she bumped into Philip Munday.
Munday, a James Cook University professor, had been trying to see if carbon dioxide hurts fish. He checked everything: weight, survival, reproduction. No obvious problems surfaced, which came as no surprise. Fish are excellent at altering blood chemistry to accommodate changing seas.
But he wanted to do more tests. He asked Dixson if she minded raising some extra clownfish for him.
On a whim they decided: Why not see if CO₂ altered how fish use their noses?
“We thought, ‘let’s just combine the two experiments and see how it goes,’ not expecting that we’d see anything,” Munday said.

CO₂-rich seas can scramble fish behavior

High levels of CO₂ can alter a fish’s sense of smell, hearing and sight — even its decision-making. That leads young tropical reef fish to die more often. Here’s what happens.

Mark Nowlin / The Seattle Times

Surprises came right away. Exposed to high CO₂, the fish quit distinguishing between odors and were equally attracted to every scent. Since clownfish use smell to stay safe, the duo then exposed babies in high-CO₂ water to dottybacks and rock cod — bigger fish that eat young clownfish.
Normal clownfish always avoided the danger. The exposed fish lost all fear. They swam straight at predators.
Over the next few years, scientists learned CO₂ changed many reef fishes’ senses and behaviors: sight, hearing, the propensity to turn left or right. Baby reef fish exposed to high CO₂ and placed back in the wild died five times more often. Even when baby reef fish and predators were both exposed to high CO₂, young fish were bolder, ventured farther from home — and died twice as often.
Only last year did researchers learn why: Elevated CO₂ disrupts brain signaling in a manner common among many fish.
The clownfish story, in other words, was no longer just about clownfish.
By then, another American living in Australia, marine scientist Jodie Rummer, was learning that high CO₂ boosted aerobic capacity for some tropical fish, transforming them into super athletes. Yet even some of these fish showed behavioral problems. Rummer called it “dumb jock syndrome.”
“You might expect that a more athletic fish can be better at chasing food, or be better at getting away from a predator, or finding a mate,” she said. “But if their cognitive function — or their brain — is compromised under these high-CO₂ conditions, they might make bad choices. They might turn the wrong direction and end up right in a predator’s mouth.”
Most of this research had been limited to a select few tropical species. But scientists knew it wouldn’t take much for behavioral problems to impact consumers.
Acidification need only harm the wrong fish.

Big warning for high-stakes fishery

Walleye pollock show some behavioral problems similar to those found in clownfish when exposed to high levels of CO₂. That raises concern about the North Pacific’s $1 billion-a-year pollock fishery, which accounts for half the nation’s catch of fish.+ Enlarge photo

Across the Pacific Ocean from Papua New Guinea, Tom Enlow climbed a set of stairs in Dutch Harbor, Alaska, a thousand miles out in the Aleutian Islands chain. He arrived on the sorting line of a fish-processing plant owned by Redmond-based UniSea.
Behind Enlow, giant vacuum hoses spit thousands of oily walleye pollock onto a conveyor.
Pollock “is the lifeblood of our local economy, certainly, and the state’s economy, and one of the largest industries on the Northwest and West Coast,” said Enlow, the plant’s manager.
The North Pacific pollock catch is so big it sounds almost absurd. Fleets of fishermen and factory trawlers haul in 3 billion pounds annually. No other North American fishery operates on this scale. Seafood companies reel in $1 billion a year from that catch.
Pollock gets carved into frozen fish sticks, sold overseas as roe and imitation crab, or packed in blocks. McDonald’s runs television commercials trumpeting the Bering Sea fishermen who supply pollock for Filet-O-Fish sandwiches.
So pollock was among the first species the U.S. government tested in high-CO₂ water. Results late last year brought no surprise: Acidification would hurt neither the fish’s body nor its growth. Adult and young seemed physically unharmed.
But after tracking clownfish research, government scientists in Oregon tried new tests.
After smelling prey, pollock scout around and hunt it down. So NOAA biologist Thomas Hurst exposed young pollock to high CO₂ and introduced the scent of what they eat. Some of the fish struggled to recognize their food.
“In some of the very early work it looks like pollock may show some of the same kinds of deficits that are seen in coral-reef fishes,” Hurst said.
It’s too soon to say how — or even if — that would affect pollock fishing. Some tropical fish raised in high-CO₂ water gave birth to young that adjusted to their new environment. Pollock might respond the same way.
But the fish also might not. And a lot rides on the outcome, particularly in the Northwest.

Deckhands aboard the crab boat Arctic Hunter in the Bering Sea off Alaska separate male and female snow crab. Red king crab are highly susceptible to changes in water chemistry, which raises concerns about whether snow crab will be, too. View photo gallery →

Dutch Harbor might as well be a distant Seattle suburb. Washington businesses or residents often own or run its trawlers, crab boats and processors. Employees typically come from the Puget Sound region. Even the former five-term mayor of Unalaska, Dutch Harbor’s municipal government, used to fish out of Ballard.
“We don’t yet know whether it’s going to be a really severe impact or a modest impact,” Hurst said. But “if the fish is less able to recognize the scent of its prey and then therefore locate food when it’s foraging out in the wild, obviously that’s going to have negative impacts for growth and then survival in the long run.”
And that’s just one species. Similar tests are under way for rockfish, cod, several kinds of crab and sharks.
But brain damage is not even the biggest threat to commercial fish.

This pteropod, also known as a sea butterfly, comes from Puget Sound. The tiny shelled creatures are an important food source for many fish and seabirds. The shells of pteropods already are eroding in Antarctica, where the water chemistry isn’t as bad as it is in parts of the Pacific Northwest.

Key link in food chain dissolving

All over the ocean, usually too small to see, flutter beautiful, nearly see-through creatures called pteropods, also known as sea butterflies. Scientists have known for years that plummeting ocean pH eventually would begin to burn through their shells.
Few people would find that significant save for one fact: Many things eat pteropods.
Birds, fish and mammals, from pollock to whales, feast on this abundant ocean snack. Pteropods make up half the diet of baby pink salmon and get eaten by other fish, such as herring, that then get swallowed by larger animals.
So scientists were alarmed late in 2012 when researchers announced that pteropods in Antarctica were dissolving right now in waters less corrosive than those often found off Washington and Oregon. What did that mean for the Northwest?

Pink salmon swim through Finch Creek, near a salmon hatchery on Hood Canal. Pteropods make up roughly half the diet of young pink salmon in Alaska.

The United States does so little monitoring of marine systems that we know almost nothing about the health of creatures that form the bottom of the ocean food chain — things like pteropods, krill or other important zooplankton called copepods. The most-studied animals remain those we catch. Little is known about the things they eat.

Chat with the reporter

Got questions? Get answers from reporter Craig Welch at noon Tuesday.
Go to live chat →

Computer modelers such as Isaac Kaplan, at NOAA in Seattle, are scrambling to figure out how sea-chemistry changes could reverberate through the ocean.
Initial results are disturbing.
“Right now, for acidification in particular,” Kaplan said, “the risks look pretty substantial.”
Kaplan tracks the Pacific coast — temperature, pH levels, currents, salinity. He incorporates studies that detail how CO₂ impacts creatures. Then he extrapolates how all those variables are likely to affect the fish people catch.
While the models are rough and uncertainty is high — too many elements cannot be controlled — the trend is clear.
Kaplan’s early work predicts significant declines in sharks, skates and rays, some types of flounder and sole, and Pacific whiting, also known as hake, the most frequently caught commercial fish off the coast of Washington, Oregon and California.
“Some species will go up, some species will go down,” said Phil Levin, ecosystems leader for NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle. “On balance, it looks to us like most of the commercially caught fish species will go down.”

Fearing ‘a mess for this little town’

The findings confound those who rely on commercial fish.
Capt. Ben Downs stood atop the wheelhouse of the F/V Pacific Dove, in Westport, Grays Harbor County, on a recent summer day as he rolled on a fresh coat of whitewash. Downs spent years piloting one of the coast’s biggest whiting boats. This day he was prepping for shrimp fishing.

“The early warnings are there. We’ve seen the first wave that hit the oysters. We’re just hoping it doesn’t come our way.”

Dave Fraser

Who runs a hake fishing cooperative

“The ocean is always changing,” Downs said. Nearby a ship offloaded whiting at the city’s largest processor. “This is nothing different. I’ve battled the ocean all my life.”
Yet even a skeptic like Downs sees the stakes.
Coastwide, fishermen bring in tens of million pounds of whiting a year. It’s the biggest product at Westport’s fish plant, which at times employs a quarter of the city’s workforce.
“If the hake went away, it’d be a mess for this little town,” he said. “Astoria, Oregon, same thing. Newport, Oregon, same thing.”
Dave Fraser, who runs a whiting fishing cooperative, wasn’t skeptical, but weary. Fishermen already face tangible crises daily: the dollar’s value swinging wildly against the yen; quotas falling based on routine marine shifts.
“Being able to focus on something 10 or 20 years away … it’s hard,” he said. “The early warnings are there. We’ve seen the first wave that hit the oysters. We’re just hoping it doesn’t come our way.”
It is a problem not limited to fishing fleets.
“If you go 100 miles from the coast, most people say, ‘Why do I care about ocean acidification?’ ” Mathis, at NOAA, said. “Convincing a farmer in Iowa or a teacher in Kansas to care about ocean acidification is our challenge.”
He measures progress by the drop in emails from angry Alaskans challenging his findings.
“Acidification is very real: There isn’t any doubt it’s happening,” said Clem Tillion, a former Republican Alaska state Senate president, even though he still denies human contributions to global warming. “It’s obvious. And it’s going to be devastating.”

Fishermen gather at sunset in the South Pacific, off Normanby Island. Nearly 1 billion people around the world get the bulk of their animal protein from fish. View photo gallery →

At stake: food for rural people

On a warm Papua New Guinea night, a quarter-mile from Fabricius’ CO₂ vents, Edwin Morioga and Ridley Guma sat in the dark in a canoe and prepped their spears.

Ridley Guma and Edwin Morioga dive at night using spears and flashlights to catch reef fish off Normanby Island, Papua New Guinea.+ Enlarge photo

The rain-forest jungles of Milne Bay are home to wallabies, flying rodents, cockatoos and butterflies the size of dinner plates. Villagers raise taro, yams and other vegetables. Many know increasing storms and rising seas someday will force them to move their sago tree huts to higher ground.
But with a quarter of a million people spread across 600 islands, the threat to food may be more significant.
Most of their protein comes from the sea. Fishermen unspool hand lines to collect sweetlips and sea perch. They gather shrimp and crustaceans. And at night they dodge tiger sharks and saltwater crocodiles to spear small fish from beneath bountiful corals.
Globally, the sea provides the primary source of animal protein for a billion people. Many, like Morioga and Guma, have few alternatives.
The pair slipped into the water and floated face down, flashlights trained on the reef. Neither knew much about Fabricius’ acidification research. But they agreed they did not want CO₂ from the West or an industrializing Asia transforming their reefs into places resembling the desolate nearby bubble sites.
Away from the vents, amid the coral, life of all kinds is still plentiful.
In an instant, Morioga saw a flash. He took a breath and dived, stabbing beneath a branching coral. After a pause, Morioga surfaced.
On the end of his spear writhed a tiny rabbitfish, his first catch of the night from what remains one of the world’s healthiest reefs.
At least for now.

Changes come decades faster than expected

Less than a decade ago, scientists expected acidification wouldn’t harm marine life until late in the 21st century. In the past five years, researchers instead have figured out it’s happening now. Here is a timeline of what we thought we knew — and how that changed.

Early 20th century

Scientists begin to understand how carbon moves between the atmosphere and the sea.

1999

A handful of scientists predict rising CO₂ emissions may change sea chemistry enough to harm corals by late in the 21st century.

2003

Atmospheric scientist Ken Caldeira predicts sea chemistry will change more rapidly over the next century than it has in tens of millions of years.

2006

Seattle oceanographer Richard Feely, with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and others discover North Pacific sea chemistry has changed dramatically just since they sampled it in 1991.
Top ocean researchers release first major ocean-acidification report and brief Congress, highlighting marine changes they fear are possible by century’s end.

2007

Feely and colleagues take an ocean research trip between Canada and Mexico and find enormous stretches of seawater already changing in ways not expected for 50 to 100 years. Because of ocean currents, weather and geography, they figure out, West Coast sea chemistry — unlike oceans at large — will worsen for decades even if fossil-fuel emissions are cut.

2008

Scientists suspect sea-chemistry changes are killing oyster larvae in the Northwest, which would mean acidification is harming marine life at least a half-century sooner than expected.
Scientists predict tiny shelled pteropods, an important food for fish, birds and whales, will begin dissolving in Antarctica between 2030 and 2038.

2009

Oceanographer Jeremy Mathis finds the chemistry of water in the Gulf of Alaska changing more drastically than models projected.

2011

Mathis discovers CO₂ levels in the Bering Sea are amplified by melting sea ice. That exposes more ocean surface to fossil-fuel emissions and lets in sunlight, which allows plankton to bloom and die, boosting carbon dioxide even more. The pH of broad stretches of the North Pacific is now so low several months of the year that some animals already may struggle to grow shells.

2012

Scientists say they’re certain ocean acidification is killing Northwest oysters.
Computer models based on new data project that the acidified water that occasionally kills Northwest oysters will be common every day on half the U.S. West Coast in less than 40 years.
Scientist Nina Bednarsek finds pteropods in Antarctica already dissolving.

2013

Researchers show baby king crab die in high numbers when exposed to CO₂-rich waters expected later this century. Mathis finds North Pacific sea chemistry at certain times of the year already is that bad.
— Craig Welch

Craig Welch: 206-464-2093 or cwelch@seattletimes.com. On Twitter @craigawelch.
“Sea Change” was produced, in part, with funding from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. This article was published September 12, 2013.

via/ seattletimes.com

Murmuration by Sophie Windsor Clive & Liberty Smith

How to Win the War on Terror: Repeal the Patriot Act

Carl Gibson

Co-Founder, US Uncut

By the Fall of 2014, we all need to agree on two simple demands - that all members of the House and Senate who voted for the Patriot Act, and all of its subsequent renewals, be voted out of office. The other demand is that anyone running for Congress must promise to repeal the Patriot Act before doing anything else.

The only thing more alarming than the news about the NSA's all-encompassing citizen spying program PRISM, are members of Congress defending this blatant violation of 4th amendment rights protecting all citizens from unreasonable search and seizure. PRISM mined data from Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Youtube, and other sites. They monitored calls from Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint networks. And they even mined data from credit card companies. Since the Patriot Act was signed into law shortly after 9/11, warrantless wiretapping and constant monitoring of our phone and email conversations has been business as usual. This is the fault of both the Bush and Obama administrations, as each corporate party is captive to the same military-industrial complex making big bucks from the intrusive police and surveillance state in the US.
This government is waging war on civil liberties, and anyone who speaks out against its overreach. After the Obama administration's DOJ seized phone records of AP reporters, they defended their decision, saying it was important to catch and punish government whistleblowers. The ongoing Bradley Manning trial is just one of many metaphors for the government clamping down on anyone trying to shine light on unconstitutional and criminal actions taken by the government. There are ominous posters in the DC Metro implying that government whistleblowers will be killed. This is even happening at the state level -- the Wisconsin legislature convened under the cover of night to pass a bill banning the Center for Investigative Journalism from the University of Wisconsin campus, directly intruding on a free press' right to public documents.
This didn't all just happen overnight. After the passage of the Patriot Act in 2001, our rights to privacy as citizens were signed away. Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) was the only senator who voted no to the bill that gave massive new powers to the DOJ. Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) didn't vote yes or no. The House vote for the 2001 bill was also pretty one-sided - the Patriot Act passed 357-66. When it came up for reauthorization in 2006, the Senate passed it 89-10 (there were several who voted yes in 2001 and no in 2006) and the house passed it 280-138. And in 2011, the Patriot Act was extended through 2015 on an 86-12 vote in the Senate, and a 275-144 vote in the House. You can see how your members of Congress voted here, here and here. And it's important to note that presidents of both parties signed extensions of the Patriot Act into law.
The whole argument behind this assault on our civil liberties is that the Patriot Act's passage and subsequent extensions were necessary to win the so-called war on terror. Today, we've since killed Osama bin Laden and numerous other presumed al-Qaeda leaders. We were told the reason 9/11 happened is because terrorists hate our freedom. But if the main assailant on our constitutional rights today is the government itself, then that makes anyone in Congress who still supports the Patriot Act a terrorist attacking our freedom.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) defended these intrusions on our rights, saying, "It's called protecting America." It's worth noting that Feinstein received almost $200,000 from Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, BAE Systems and drone manufacturer General Atomics in the 2012 election cycle. Ardent Patriot Act supporters like Feinstein aren't protecting their constituents, but the profits and stock prices of their sugar daddies.
Obama ran on a promise of discontinuing warrantless wiretapping in 2008. He's since become embroiled in scandals of Nixonian proportions after the seizure of the AP's phone calls and, most recently, our own. His presidency marked the rise of the oppressive surveillance state that was too busy monitoring peaceful protesters to catch the Boston bombers, even after Russia warned us twice over that bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev was in the US and was capable of planning a terrorist attack. While the Obama administration's NSA missed out on the Tsarnaevs, they've almost completed their new, state-of-the-art data center in the mountains of Utah, where every phone call and every piece of online communication from every citizen is stored. This troubling new surveillance culture isn't for terrorists, it's for us.
George Orwell's book 1984 was meant to be a fiction novel, not an instruction manual. If we want to stop the government's tyrannical spree and blatant disregard for our rights, we have to insist that the Patriot Act be repealed and that we abolish the Department of Homeland Security in its entirety. We can no longer call ourselves a free country until we accomplish both of those objectives.

Posted: 06/08/2013 4:16 am

Read more

1984, Department Of Homeland Security, Patriot Act, Russ Feingold, Warrantless Wiretapping, Dianne Feinstein, Justice Department, Nsa, Prism, Spying, Politics News

Posted: 06/08/2013 4:16 am

Read more

via/http://www.huffingtonpost.com

I Am A Zombie Filled With Love

By Isaac Marion
 

 I am a zombie, and it's not so bad. I'm learning to live with it. I'm sorry I can't properly introduce myself, but I don't have a name anymore. Hardly any of us do. We forget them, like anniversaries and PIN numbers. I think mine might have started with a "T", but I'm not sure. It's funny, because back when I was alive, I was always forgetting other people's names. I am finding that irony abounds in the zombie life, an ever-present punch line. But it's hard to smile when your lips have rotted off.

Before I became a zombie, I think I was a businessman or young professional of some kind. I think I worked in one of those stifling office jobs in a highrise somewhere. The clothes clinging to the remains of my body are high-quality business-casual. Fine gabardine slacks, silvery silk shirt, red Armani power tie. I would probably look pretty sharp if my intestines weren't dragging at my feet. Ha.

We like to joke and speculate about our remaining outfits, since these final fashion choices are usually the only indication of who we were before we became no-one. Some people's are less obvious than mine. Jeans and a white t-shirt. Skirt and a tanktop. So we make random guesses. 

You were a plumber. You were a barista. Ring any bells?

It usually doesn't.

No one I know has any specific memories. We recognize some things — buildings, cars, ties — but context eludes us. We are here, we do what we do. We lack excellent diction, but we can communicate. We grunt and groan, we make hand gestures, and sometimes a few words slip out. It's not that different from before.

There are a few hundred of us living in a wide plain of dust outside some large city. We don't need shelter or warmth, obviously. We stand around in the dust, and time passes. I think we've been here for a long time. Despite my dragging entrails, I am in decay's early stages, but there are a few elderly ones here who are little more than skeletons with clinging bits of muscle. Somehow, it still extends and contracts, and they keep moving. I have never seen any of us "die" of old age. Maybe we live forever, I don't know. I don't think much about the future anymore. That's something that's very different from before. When I was alive, the future was all I thought about. Obsessed about. Death has relaxed me.

But it makes me sad that we've forgotten our names. Out of everything, this seems to me the most tragic. I don't miss my own, but I mourn for everyone else's, because I want to love them, but I don't know who they are.

Today a group of us are going into town to find some food. How this expedition begins is one of us gets hungry and starts shuffling toward town, and a few others follow him. Focused thought is a rare occurrence with us, and we follow it when we see it. Otherwise we would just be standing around groaning. We do a lot of standing around groaning, and it's frustrating sometimes. Years pass this way. The flesh withers on our bones, and we stand around, waiting for it. I am curious how old I might be.

The city where the people live is not that far. We arrive around noon and start looking for living flesh. The new kind of hunger is a strange feeling. You don't feel it in your stomach -  of course not, since some of us don't even have stomachs. You feel it just...everywhere. You start to feel "more dead". I've watched some of my friends go back to being full-dead, when food is scarce. They just slow down, and stop, and become corpses again. I don't really understand it.

I guess the world has mostly ended, because the cities we wander through are decaying as fast as we are. Buildings are collapsed. Dead, rusted cars fill the streets. All glass everywhere is shattered. I don't know if there was a war, or a plague, or if it was just us. Maybe it was all three. I don't know. I don't think about things like that anymore.

In a cluster of broken down apartment buildings we find some people, and we eat them. Some of them have weapons, and as usual we lose some of our number, but we don't care. Why would we care? What's death, now?

Eating is not a pleasant business. I chew off a man's arm, and I hate this, it's disgusting. I hate his screams, because I don't like pain, I don't like to hurt things, but this is the world now, this is what we do. Of course, if I don't eat all of him, if I leave enough, he'll rise up and follow me back to our dusty field outside the city, and that might make me feel better. I'll introduce him to everyone, and maybe we'll stand around and groan for a while. It's hard to say what "friends" are anymore, but maybe that's close. If I don't eat all of him, if I leave enough...

 But of course I don't leave enough. I eat his brain, because that's the good part. That's the part that, when I swallow it, makes my head light up with feelings. Clear memories. For about three to ten seconds, depending on the person, I get to feel alive. I get traces of delicious meals, beautiful music, perfume, sunsets, orgasms, life. Then it fades, and I get up and stumble out of the city, still dead, but feeling a little less so. Feeling ok.

I don't know why we have to eat people. I don't understand what chewing off a man's neck accomplishes. We certainly don't digest the meat and absorb the nutrients. My stomach is a rotted bag of dried bile, useless. We don't digest, we just eat until the weight forces it out our ass holes, and then we eat more. It feels so useless, and yet it keeps us walking. I don't know why. None of us really understand why we are the way we are. We don't know if we're the result of some kind of global infection, or some ancient curse, or something even more senseless. We don't talk about it much. Existential debate is not a major part of zombie life. We are here, and we do things. We are simple. It's nice sometimes.

Outside the city again, back with the others in the dust field, I start walking in a circle for no reason. I plant one foot in the dirt and pivot on it, around and around, kicking up clouds of dust. Before, when I was alive, I could never have done this. I remember stress. I remember bills and deadlines, Asset Retention Reports. I remember being so occupied, so always, everywhere, all the time occupied. Now I'm just standing in a wide-open field of dust, walking in a circle. The world has been distilled. Being dead is easy.

After a few days of this, I stop walking, and I stand still, swaying back and forth and groaning a little. I don't know why I groan. I'm not in pain, and I'm not sad. I think it's just air being squeezed in and out of my lungs. When my lungs decompose, it will probably stop. And now, while swaying and groaning, I notice a dead woman standing a few feet away from me, facing the distant mountains. She doesn't sway or groan, her head just lolls from side to side. I like that about her, that she doesn't sway or groan. I walk over and stand beside her. I wheeze some kind of greeting, and she responds with a lurch of her shoulder.

I like her. I reach out and touch her hair. She has not been dead very long. Her skin is grey and her eyes slightly sunken, but she has no exposed bones or organs. Her death outfit is a black skirt and a snug white button-up. I suspect she used to be a waitress.

Pinned to her chest is a silver nametag.

I can read her name. She has a name.

Her name is Emily.

I point to her chest. Slowly, with great effort, I say, "Em..ily." The word rolls off what's left of my tongue like honey. What a good name. I feel warm saying it.

Emily's cloudy eyes widen at the sound, and she smiles. I also smile, and then maybe I'm a little nervous because my femur snaps and I fall backwards into the dust. Emily just laughs, and it's a choked, raw, lovely sound. She reaches down and helps me to my feet.

Emily and I have fallen in love.

I'm not sure how this happens. I remember what love was like before, and this is different. This is simpler. Before, there were complex emotional and biological factors at work. We had long checklists and elaborate tests to be passed. We looked at hairstyles and careers and breast sizes. And sex was there, in everything, confusing everyone, like hunger. It created longing, it created ambition, competition, it drove people to leave their houses and invent automobiles, space craft, and atom bombs when they could instead just sit on the couch until they died. Animal cravings. Subconscious urges. Sex made the world go ‘round.

This is all gone now. Sex, once a force as universal as gravity, is now irrelevant. Ambition and longing have left the equation. My penis fell off two weeks ago.

So the equation is deleted, the blackboard erased, and things are different now. Our actions have no ulterior motives. We shuffle around in the dust and occasionally have lumbering, grunted exchanges with our peers. No one argues. There are no fights, ever.

And Emily is not a complicated process. I just see her, and walk over to her, and for no reason, really, I decide I want to be with her for a long time. So now we shuffle around in the dust together instead of alone. For whatever reason, we enjoy each other's company. When we have to go into town to eat people, we do it at separate times, because it's unpleasant, and we don't want to share that. But we share everything else, and it's nice.

We decide to walk to the mountains. It takes us three days, but now we are standing on a cliff looking up at a fat white moon. At our backs, the night sky is red from distant cities burning, but we don't care about that. I clumsily grab Emily's hand, and we stare at the moon.

 There's no real reason for any of this, but like I said, the world has been distilled. Love has been distilled. Everything is easy now. Yesterday my leg broke off, and I don't even mind.

End

---

NOTE:

This story was the seed for a full-length novel called WARM BODIES which is now being published in 16 languages and made into a film by Summit Entertainment. Hooray!

WARM BODIES is available now in the UK. It comes out March 8th, 2011 in the US, and can be pre-ordered now on Amazon.

via/www.burningbuilding.com