The ocean is broken

reply to post by texasyeti


Well there you go, like I said its far from unfeasible, this kid has the right of it.

In fact whole swaths of ships cleaning up would be counterproductive. We seem to be spending millions on drones for the military, well you can take a quarter of that money make autonomous booyes like the ones in the link or more advanced, set them in garbage areas at sea, put a guidance tracker on them and nature the motion of the ocean/ waves and time will do the rest. With people coming out there once every few weeks or months for maintenance and to bring all the garbage collected back. They could be like little vacuums of the sea you could even make ones that filter out the water from oil or other hazardous chemicals even the ones that have broken down into whole other chemicals due to exposure to sea water.

In fact most of this stuff is rudimentary stuff, all you would need is a bunch of people stuck in a room for a few day to think of ways in implementing or cleaning up the oceans, you could probably expand on that kids idea by 100 fold in a few months. Of which 5% of the profit money that Mitsubishi thinks it will make when bluefin tuna go extinct could be used to solve our worldwide sea garbage problems. Because however, all of it would need some sort of funding even if its not much by today's industry standards.

In all like I said this sort of stuff are usually the last ditch effort of going about such things. Preventive methods have there uses, but making sure problems dont happen in the first place and changing the whole outlook or how we do things, would be a much more efficient way of going about things.

Is there any way for us to make things better in any way or is this ultimately going to be the end of life as we know it? I dont even see how it would be possible to correct this.

I can't find it right now - have to go pick up my son in a few but I think it was wrabbit who said in a thread that when we see dolphins, whales, bees, bats, and frogs (I know I'm not getting this precise) begin to die off it means an extinction level event is on the horizon.

Didn't the bee die off start before fukushima? And bats as well? That is from disease and god knows what for the bees. For the ocean - smallest takes up radiation readily, which becomes more concentrated for some reason as it moves up the food chain. This would tell us we have multiple enviornmental stresses all culminating to cause this.

Maybe it's all of these factors but in what ratios:

Methane - one poster has a good theory on this as one cause.
Climate change - causes disease to thrive, etc.
Pollution
Fukushima (technically pollution but in class of its own)
Overuse and attempts to control the natural (pesticides, depleting certain ecosystems due to human need/want).

Some may be natural but IMO there is a huge human impact. And people think we can keep adding to the population without consequence? I think we badly need to keep an eye on these tell tale species - as they are the way to measure the health of our planet.

reply to post by Isitwhatitis


Yes, we can fix this. It isn't going to be fast. It isn't going to be painless. And it is going to take a huge commitment on the our part.

If you look at some of the clean up ideas, you will see that they are out there.

The radioactive problem is a bit tougher to tackle. I have to admit, I am not sure how to safely handle and dispose of all those used rods. But brilliant minds are working on that as we speak. Let us hope they have something to add.

BT

reply to post by Dianec


Again, I agree with you Dianec.

This did begin well before Dianec, but so did our polluting of the seas, and the traversing of our path through the universe, which we sometimes forget about.

It all plays a part.

BT

reply to post by BearTruth


Yea I think it was me just processing it out loud - all potential causes link back to us.

reply to post by BearTruth

reply to post by Emerys


That is a chilling video.

Quite telling actually.

BT

I found this thread and decided to give it a bump.

The world's oceans are dying. Overfishing is a major problem that will severely impact humanity in the decades ahead. Not much is being done to save our oceans. This is one of the biggest threats to my generation and very few seem to care and even fewer are willing to do something about it.

This really hits home to me. I grew up in our near the ocean and adjacent waterways. I've personally witnessed the visibility of the Indian River Lagoon go from 10'+ on a good day to maybe 4' on a good day(it is only about 10' in channel). This correlated with the boom in commercial clamming in the late 1980's to early 90's. Also in that time frame I could have gone to any sandbar and dug out dozens of clams, now I'm lucky to find a single clam.

The oceans our too important to just ignore, if they die so do we. We need to stand together as a species and work to preserve our oceans and our clean water!

reply to post by jrod


Thank you for your post jrod. I feel exactly the same way. I swam in the Atlantic and the Pacific when they were cleaner and clear. I waded in the Ocean in Hawaii and Puerta Vallarta, and it was beautiful. Playing in the tidepools in San Diego when I was a child, and Laguna Beach as an adult was wondrous because of all the sea life in the rocks and reefs.

I cannot conceive of a world where the oceans are poisoned, and the sea life gone.

BT