Sludgie

Mother Jones magazine has dedicated a whole issue to the world’s oceans, delving into the current state of affairs with a cheerful, infectious sense of fun:

Fishing harder, faster, and more ruthlessly than ever before, we drive large predatory fish toward global extinction, even though fish is the primary source of protein for one in six people on earth… Oceanic problems once encountered on a local scale have gone pandemic, and these pandemics now merge to birth new monsters. Tinkering with the atmosphere, we change the ocean’s chemistry radically enough to threaten life on earth as we know it.

Like I said. It's a crack-up. In one article, Julia Whitty recounts a harrowing trip out on the ship Oceanus, rocked by near-hurricane gales, with a group of research scientists.

In the course of a week, we’ll measure temperature, oxygen, salinity, and chlorofluorocarbons in the water column—the equivalent of taking the ocean’s pulse, listening to its lungs, looking at its tongue, and making it say “ah.”

Of course, deep sea researchers call these boat-going scientists a bunch of sissies, claiming that deep-sea dives are the equivalent of cupping the ocean’s testicles and saying, “Turn your head and cough.”

Ms. Whitty details the many different forms of abuse we inflict on our salty friend, the Sea: low frequency sonar deployed by the military and oil companies, global warming, rising mercury levels, pollution.

Making tens of thousands of chemical compounds each year, we poison marine creatures who sponge up plastics and PCBs, becoming toxic waste dumps in the process.

One of the most notable casualties of this process is Spongebob Squarepants, who lives in a pineapple under the sea. His unusually absorbent skin has sponged up so much radioactive waste, his whole body appears pale yellow. He also pisses French’s ballpark mustard.

Meanwhile, fishing in the ocean is brutal and merciless: long-line fishing, trawlers and drift nets kill indiscriminately, taking in as much as 25% of their catch in the form of sea turtles, sharks, dolphins and threatened species that are caught inadvertently. It's as if the fishing industry built a toaster the size of Nevada, plugged it in and dropped it into the middle of the Pacific.

Possibly the most unsettling threat is the growing number of oceanic dead zones, where absolutely no life exists anymore. The second largest in the world is in the Gulf of Mexico, measuring nearly 8,000 square miles.

Oddly, it acts like a living thing: growing in spring, thriving in summer, decaying in fall, gaining in size almost every year. Core sediment samples and computer hindcasting pinpoint its birth date to the aftermath of World War II, when a surplus of nitrogen destined for TNT was redeployed as agricultural fertilizer.

So, it was born shortly after WWII, has been gaining in size each year, and is a major threat to the world. Which kind of makes it the Dr. Phil of oceanic disasters.

While I’ve read about numerous problems plaguing our oceans, I’ve never read one article that sums it all up so flatly. It’s pretty alarming: World shark populations down 50% since 1986. Fresh water from melting ice caps threatening to cover England with glaciers in the next century. The disappearance of all coral reefs by 2050 due to oceanic acidity. And one study from Nova Scotia which concludes that after the past few decades of fishing, only ten percent of all tuna, swordfish, marlin, cod, and halibut are left anywhere in the ocean.

It's easy to forget the ocean, typecast as a bad guy in movies such as "Perfect Storm" and "Into the Blue". But the atrocities we commit there would be unthinkable on land. So next time you order the swordfish platter, or take a drive in your SUV, or dump nitrogen-based fertilizer into the ocean (that's right - I'm talking to you, pal), think about the sea turtles who choke on plastic bags, mistaking them for jellyfish. Think about Spongebob pissing mustard. Earth is vastly more ocean than land - 70% of its surface is water. And we're just floating on little islands, mucking it all to hell.

Last Days of the Ocean (Mother Jones)

It's Hard Out Here for a Shrimp

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