Sea-level rise would be a complicated topic even if it were not politicized. People often talk as though the seabed were like a bathtub, rigid and immobile, into which water either pours or does not.
But it’s not; it rises and falls in complex local patterns, it erodes and accumulates, it shifts about. And it seems to be drifting downward if you get our drift.
This is continental because a new study says thanks to landmasses moving away from one another the seas are about 250 meters deeper than they were in the heyday of the dinosaurs and the seabeds are older than they’ve ever been.
The effect on ocean currents, heat absorption, and climate is… unclear.
It’s strange to realize that, deep as the seas are, they’re not very deep, in the sense that you wouldn’t think a 2.3-mile car ride very far.
You may have heard that if the Earth were the size of a billiard ball it would be smoother, a very cool factoid lacking just one key quality: accuracy.
Actually the Earth’s surface is rough, like sandpaper. But there is an important truth hidden in that urban legend: The mighty mountains and ocean depths that stir our souls are as grains of sand to the Earth.
If our planet were the size of a billiard ball (namely 5.715 cm give or take .127 mm), Mt. Everest would be 0.04 millimeters high, which would certainly simplify one item on the old bucket list.
And the awesome Marianas Trench would be barely bigger, at 0.45 mm. (Don’t ask how big you’d be unless you fancy a session in the Total Perspective Vortex.)
So yes, even the Marianas Trench is nothing to the planet, despite the intricate way life depends not just on oceans but ocean tides.
As to the importance of ocean depth to the biosphere, well, it’s hard to tell, isn’t it?
Back when Allosaurus roamed the Earth, there were very high levels of CO2 and it was warmer (which are not causally related) and despite Al Gore’s blather about a “nature hike through the Book of Revelation” life was doing pretty well… except for the stuff that blundered into the path of Allosaurus.
But how much of the warmth, and biological abundance, is related to the oceans being relatively shallower around the slowly separating Laurasia and Gondwana? Did it contribute to the Jurassic being lusher than the Triassic? And if so how? It’s very complicated.
It’s even hard to know what exactly we’re trying to measure when it comes to “sea-level rise” given that some places, including study author Krister Karlsen’s native Norway, have risen hundreds of meters since the ice last retreated and are still rising a few millimeters a year in a rebound from the glaciers’ crushing mass.
But we have bigger fish to fry here, possibly caught at greater depths.
Are deeper oceans bad for life? Are the currents different? How does this depth, and capacity to store more water, affect other processes including climate?
Notwithstanding the science being settled, no one knows.
But over the last 2.5 million years the planet has seen some very harsh conditions for life, with prolonged glaciations and desertification proving that cold is bad and warmth is good. Does it also prove deep oceans are bad for life?
If so, there’s hope on the horizon. Regrettably, it’s the geological horizon. According to this study, continental drift has moved the various bits of land that resulted when Pangaea broke up as far apart as they can get, and the farther apart they are the older and deeper the seabed gets.
Now they should start moving back together again to form a new supercontinent for which the boring name Pangaea Proxima has been proposed. Before Pangaea, there was Rodinia c. a billion years ago and “earlier yet, the supercontinent Nuna might have existed more than 1.5 billion years ago.”
Those names sure beat calling them Pangaea I, II and III or Pangaea Praevia or some dumb thing. But focus on the “might have” there. Don’t we know?
Well, it turns out we don’t. In fact, the article says, “whether this cycle is related to a sea-level supercycle remains uncertain. ‘It’s hard to say anything about the regularity of such a possible cycle,’ says Karlsen.”
With all this uncertainty, it’s important to hang on to the key point: Sea levels are rising because of bad people doing bad things and it will be bad for the good things.
For instance, we noted last week that after years of warnings that the oceans cannot absorb the man-made CO2 that therefore hangs around in the air cooking the planet and it’s a catastrophe, we were suddenly told the oceans were absorbing too much man-made CO2 and it’s a catastrophe.
But this week we’re again told they can’t absorb enough of it, at least in the western Arctic Ocean and, you’ll never guess, it’s a catastrophe.
That’s always the punchline, which at least saves you the trouble of listening carefully to the joke.
Thus, “thresholds of mangrove survival under rapid sea-level rise” warns us that mangroves cannot cope with the supposed recent doubling in sea-level rise although “The response of mangroves to high rates of relative sea-level rise (RSLR) is poorly understood.”
In fact, NASA is boasting that this November, it will launch the best “state-of-the-art” satellite ever to “collect the most accurate data yet on sea level—a key indicator of how Earth’s warming climate is affecting the oceans, weather, and coastlines.”
Not “whether”, you’ll notice. They already made the finding. Now they just need to corral suitable data.
They’re quite up-front about it. NASA boasts that: “These measurements are important because the oceans and atmosphere are tightly connected. ‘We’re changing our climate, and the clearest signal of that is the rising oceans,’ said Josh Willis, the mission’s project scientist at JPL. ‘More than 90% of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases is going into the ocean.’ That heat causes seawater to expand, accounting for about one-third of the global average of modern-day sea-level rise. Meltwater from glaciers and ice sheets account for the rest. ‘For climate science, what we need to know is not just sea level today, but sea level compared to 20 years ago. We need long records to do climate science,’ said Willis.”
Um if you don’t even know how sea level today compares to 20 years ago, let alone 2,000 or 2 million or 200 million, how do you already know that the clearest signal that “we” are changing our climate is rising oceans, and that about a third is expanding seawater and two-thirds is meltwater? Verdict first, huh?
Read more at Climate Discussion Nexus
