The gorgeous blue waters of the eastern Mediterranean are dotted with ancient sea coast villages and cities. The fertile crescent is where agriculture began, and at that moment, the biosphere would never be the same again. Both have "sustained humans for millennia."
It took us thousands of years to reach the point where the earth has become overpopulated; the bounty of nature is now unsustainable as we consume more resources than can be replaced by nature.
The oceans and land are poisoned with toxic chemicals, plastics, and the extraordinary destruction of our habitat by burning fossil fuels to power our civilization. Humans have never experienced the temperatures that we see today, we did not evolve in this climate, and neither has the majority of the food chain that nurtures us. We are on borrowed time.
In the past few hundred centuries, the industrial revolution burned carbon-based fuels has gradually warmed the climate. However, the Great Acceleration after World War Two brought us to the point of the sixth mass event we face today. Our Epoch is now referred to as the Anthropocene. Since 1950 sapiens' population has exploded, and medical breakthroughs along with burning fossil fuels for industrialization and powering indoor heating and cooling have thrived. We live in luxury that our ancestors never experienced and never dreamed was possible. Scientists have nicknamed this period the Great Acceleration.
The oceans have protected us from harm as they absorb most of the CO2 that we funnel into the atmosphere second after second.
The oceans sequester the carbon and store it in the depths. But depressingly, the Mediterranean Sea can no longer perform this function. Instead, the eastern half of the Mediterranean sea has become a source of deadly greenhouse gas; this finding might be the first discovery of carbon release in a saltwater basin.
Wired Magazine writes on the science of the phenomenon in plain Engish. It is a compelling read, and I encourage all to read it. The scientific study is here.
Think of this part of the Mediterranean as a cake made of liquid, essentially. Fierce sunlight heats the top layer of water that sits on cooler, deeper layers below. Out in the open ocean, where water temperatures are lower, CO2 dissolves in saltwater—which is what allows Earth’s seas to collectively absorb a quarter of the carbon emissions that humans pump into the atmosphere. But as the eastern Mediterranean Sea heats up in the summer, it can no longer absorb that gas and instead starts releasing it.
It’s the same thing that happens in a bottle of soda that is carbonated with carbon dioxide. “You usually keep it cold, so the dissolved gasses will stay dissolved,” says Or Bialik, a geoscientist at the University of Münster in Germany. “If you leave it in your car for a while and try to open it, all the gasses are going to pop out at once, because when it warms, the capacity of the fluid to hold CO2 goes down.” Boom, fizz, you’ve got a mess on your hands.
In the Eastern Mediterranean, this dynamic is rather more consequential for the climate than a sticky car interior, as the sea begins burping up great quantities of CO2 that the water can no longer hold. And Bialik and his colleagues have discovered that these warming, stratifying waters teem with a second carbon problem: The team recently caught aragonite crystals in sediment traps. Aragonite is a form of calcium carbonate, which oceanic creatures like snails use to build their shells. Except in the increasingly hot Eastern Mediterranean, the aragonite is forming abiotically. That’s another sign that the water is getting so warm that it’s releasing its carbon load.
In these hot, shallow, stable waters, the fluid on top doesn’t mix much with the underlying colder layers, in contrast to deeper parts of the ocean, where upwelling brings up cooler H2O. “The conditions are so extreme that we can definitely generate calcium carbonate chemically from these waters, which was kind of a shock for us,” says Bialik, who coauthored a recent paper describing the discovery in the journal Scientific Reports. (He did the research while at the University of Malta and University of Haifa.) “It's basically like a beaker that sits there for a very long time, and it's long enough to get these reactions going and start generating these crystals.”
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It’s also worth noting that the Mediterranean Sea is one of the most microplastic-polluted water bodies in the world: In 2020, scientists reported finding 2 million particles in a single square meter of sediment that was only 5 centimeters thick. Whether aragonite crystals are forming around microplastics floating in the water column, Bialik doesn’t know. “They could probably form around any nucleation center,” says Bialik. “I suspect that microplastics may also be a possible one. But as scientists love to say, more research is needed.”
Interesting Engineering weighs in.
The acidity of the sea decreases as it warms and loses CO2, both from the water belching it up and from the proliferating crystals. This is the inverse of the process causing widespread ocean acidification: As humans emit more CO2 into the atmosphere, the oceans absorb more of it, causing a chemical reaction that increases acidity. However, as the Mediterranean warms and releases the carbon it has absorbed back into the atmosphere, it becomes more basic, reversing the acidification.
It's unclear whether aragonite crystals are growing in number globally. The waters near the Bahamas and in the Persian Gulf take on a milky color due to calcium carbonate precipitating in far more
There is no do-over on climate. Undoubtedly, we should be bracing ourselves for disruption in every part of our lives. Those who don’t give a fuck are killing themselves, me, and you. Voting for the party that recognizes reality is the most important thing we can do.
I see everything through the prism of climate change as does Childish Gambino. This video speaks to me.