Oceans

A dead whale in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, in 2011. As container ships multiply, more whales are being harmed, a study said. CreditMarco De Swart/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

CLICK HERE - RESEARCH - Marine defaunation: Animal loss in the global ocean

nytimes.com - by Carl Zimmer - January 15, 2015

A team of scientists, in a groundbreaking analysis of data from hundreds of sources, has concluded that humans are on the verge of causing unprecedented damage to the oceans and the animals living in them.

“We may be sitting on a precipice of a major extinction event,” said Douglas J. McCauley, an ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an author of the new research, which was published on Thursday in the journal Science.

Image: Carving whale shark. Photo: WildLifeRisk

businessinsider.com.au - January 28, 2014 - Chris Pash

An activist group has uncovered what it says is a whale shark factory in China processing up to 600 of the endangered fish each year.

WildLifeRisk, a Hong Kong-based conservation group, says the whale sharks are being processed at the “China Wenzhou Yueqing Marine Organisms Health Protection Foods Co Ltd” in China’s PuQi township near Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province.

The factory is fed by a network of agents who pay fishermen up to $US30,000 for one whale shark which can grow to 12m and weigh 20 tonnes.

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submitted by Joe Browder

Offsetting carbon emissions by conserving ocean vegetation

thebluecarbonproject.com

What is Blue Carbon?

The problem: The growing emission of carbon dioxide from a wide range of human activities is causing unprecedented changes to the land and sea. Identifying effective, efficient and politically acceptable approaches to reduce the atmospheric concentration of CO₂ is one of society’s most pressing goals.

Earth's surface oceans are quite apparent, even from satellite images of our blue marble, but now scientists have found oceans' worth of water are hidden deep in Earth's mantle, locked up in a mineral called ringwoodite. 
Credit: NASA/NOAA

npr.org - by L. Carol Ritchie - June 15, 2014

. . . Scientists have discovered evidence of a vast reservoir of water hiding up to 400 miles beneath the surface.

The discovery could transform our understanding of how the planet was formed, suggesting that Earth's water may have come from within, rather than from collisions with large, icy comets.

The water is trapped in a blue mineral called ringwoodite that sits in the mantle, a hot, rocky layer between the Earth's crust and outer core.

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CLICK HERE - STUDY - Dehydration melting at the top of the lower mantle

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