New horror revealed in sargassum blob
caymannewsservice.com
caymannewsservice.com
They don't really know what's going on and so they don't really know if this is all bad news or if there is some silver lining here of some sort, such as a potential means to get rid of plastics in the ocean.
That possibility is not unprecedented. We use petroleum-eating microbes to help clean up oil spills in the ocean. Such microbes are typically harmless to humans.
(Typically -- with the exception that people with cystic fibrosis sometimes die from infection with them though normal humans almost never get infected. To me, this implies people with CF likely retain petroleum products, including plastics, more than average.)
The common factor between cholera and vibriosis is the effect these bacteria have on the human gut, increasing permeability ("leaky gut syndrome").
As such, the Vibrio genus is "the dominant cause of death in humans from the marine environment" (quote from the article's FAU source.)
On top of that, sargassum has been increasing due to factors like increasing water temperatures, and large amounts of it end up on beaches or just offshore. It is collected by people in various ways, and even sometimes turned into animal feed. That's not the case with deployments of petroleum-eating bacteria.
Sargassum also acts as an important habitat for many kinds of marine life, increasing the number of vectors by which new Vibrio bacteria could come in contact with humans.
This all means that the potential for a bad outcome is relatively high, but as for any actual concrete risk currently, as you say that hasn't yet been established.
https://www.fau.edu/newsdesk/articles/perfect-pathogen-storm
Edit: > Direct methane emissions released to the atmosphere (without burning) are about 25 times more powerful than CO2 in terms of their warming effect on the atmosphere.
https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gases-equivalencies-ca...
Then just plant some trees to convert co2 into wood, then cut down the trees, make furniture, then dump furniture into oceans to make new oil.
The circle of oil!
It's an exponential curve. Most plastic made was made relatively recently. This is less obvious in the first world, where we've had consumer plastics for many decades. Most growth in plastic use happens outside the US.
Conversely, I don't know if that number includes production from natural gas and not just crude oil, and a lot of plastic feedstock is made from it.
That's without looking at estimates of plastic production, but it's likely enough to be higher now than the majority of the 70 years.
Therefore what plastic makes it into the oceans represents a small fraction of the total carbon emissions.
Besides, it appears to take a very long time to decay, significantly reducing the GHG potential of plastic
Every time a species becomes so well adapted that it takes over the entire biosphere, it effectively wipes out most everything else. When land plants first evolved they did the opposite of what we're doing, turned all the CO2 into oxygen and killed 85% of all life.
That was billions of years before land plants or land anything. The feat was accomplished by cyanobacteria, the first photosynthesis capable organisms on Earth. And they were blue...
Or even from Halo, although there humans are--spoiler spoiler spoiler--"exalted."
It definitely hits an interesting nexus point between existential sci-fi and Lovecraftian horror, highly recommend it.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=imNtSPM3-r4
This one has sections to help organize the story:
All Tomorrows: the Complete Timeline - https://youtu.be/qw9b9LnhY-8
Everything is awesome. Every year gets better and better for most of us on average.
Be glad we're not an icy hellscape like Pluto. Or that we don't not exist.
A look at the historic human population numbers on this planet, which exploded to unseen heights only very recently (200 years or so), coupled with looking at the also vastly increased impact of every single person compared to far more spartan living ancient humans, might give one some ideas that extending past trends might be an especially bad idea in our times. Sure, we as a species lived through a lot for hundreds of thousands of years - but none of that past is of much use to predict our future.
No, it’s not that “better”. Life expectancy increase but stress increase, smartphone penetration grow as well as children working in mines, there’s less and less food shortage but people eat crap and die from obesity. Meanwhile slums continues poping and growing everywhere - even in rich countries - and there’s a ton more lung cancer even for non-smokers.
Is it being misanthropic to point out what feels wrong in our world ? Not being mad or sad does not makes you more a humanity lover.
A man falling 50 stories feels just fine as he passes the 10th floor.
> Be glad we're not an icy hellscape like Pluto.
If we'd evolved on Pluto, we'd be adapted to Pluto. And you'd be saying "Be glad we're not on a flesh-vaporizing hellscape like Earth."
The average HN reader is probably in the top 5% of humanity in terms of all these things, so from our point of view things aren't getting that much better (but even we are seeing improvements). But for the rest of humanity, this generation is massively better off than their parents' generation, who are better off than their parents' generation, and so on. Obviously there are places in the world that are not having a great time at the moment, but on average it's getting better.
So it also did in Rome until it all fell apart. True, things could be worse. But they could be a hell of a lot better too.
If you're freezing cold and start burning your living room everything also gets better and better, on average, for a while
edit: removed mixed metaphors
Rather than attaching to seaweed, it can also stick to microplastics and (hopefully) be ingested by marine wildlife. At least as I read the articles.
> “Another interesting thing we discovered is a set of genes called ‘zot’ genes, which causes leaky gut syndrome,” said Mincer. “If a fish eats a piece of plastic and gets infected by this Vibrio, which then results in a leaky gut and diarrhoea, it’s going to release waste nutrients such nitrogen and phosphate that could stimulate sargassum growth and other surrounding organisms.”
If they didn't get recycled in the bio-sphere, and didn't float I'd expect pictures of the ocean floor to look like a weird nightmarish Hieronymus Bosch painting of a thick layer of dead but intact fish.
Many dead fish will get eaten as they fall through the water column. Things that sink all that way to the bottom of the ocean do still get recycled by the biosphere - but the biosphere at the bottom, which is only connected tenuously and very slowly with the surface - most of the carbon etc... will stay down there for a very long time.
> I'd expect pictures of the ocean floor to look like a weird nightmarish Hieronymus Bosch painting of a thick layer of dead but intact fish.
Not intact for long, because the seafloor has lots of scavengers, but yes, this is pretty accurate - see Whalefall: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whale_fall
and Marine Snow:
> About three-quarters of the deep ocean floor is covered in this thick, smooth ooze. The ooze collects as much as six meters every million years.
It doesn't necessarily automatically suggest diarrhea, though that can be one symptom or outcome.
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/22724-leaky-g...
> There was a sound like that of the gentle closing of a portal as big as the sky, the great door of heaven being closed softly. It was a grand AH-WHOOM. I opened my eyes - and all the sea was ice-nine.
If a bacteria adapts to eating plastic, you’d expect the rest to start degrading as it becomes unnecessary, and can be recycled to better plastic eating.
This is how the first vaccine was invented (and why we call them vaccines).
>the doctor took pus from the cowpox lesions on a milkmaid’s hands and introduced that fluid into a cut he made in the arm of an 8-year-old boy named James Phipps.
Cowpox was sufficiently evolved away from humans and towards cows that it was easy for the human immune system to fight, and provides antibody protection against the much more dangerous smallpox.
If these bacterium are dangerous to life in the ocean, and they can be moved around on plastic particulate on top of spreading from fish, the implication for the oceanic ecosystem seems grim to me - if not the whole biosphere.
I'm actively trying to choose products with less plastic but it's becoming increasingly hard to find alternatives.
Glass seems great - until you learn that sand extraction might be the only thing worse in terms of habitat destruction than oil itself.
Edit: we control burn areas on land all the time. Why not on the ocean?
If you could get a bunch of balloons underneath the seaweed to float it above the water, maybe it would have a hope of burning -- but the balloons would have to withstand fire. Difficult.
With a heroic effort maybe you could sweep the stuff onto a beach where it could burn. You'd burn a lot of fuel doing it, though, and then a lot of seaweed, and you wouldn't have changed the conditions that led to its growth in the first place.
Also, it's difficult to burn to a soaking-wet object without drying it out first. It's difficult to dry out things that are in the ocean.
What if we just lit them on fire...
:)
Best bets to just leave it the fuck alone.
But lots of bacteria have different forms, intensities, effects. It depends. We're partly made up of bacteria, in a safe context (the gut)
How variant is the level of this bacteria in the beachfront, compared to e.g. from enteric sources (sewage) or normal deposits? Is it seasonal?
Is it also part of the food chain of something else?
Grow more of it and sequester the remains.
Maybe we should instead try to accelerate the blob’s growth so it would absorb more CO2.
So gathering and heating biomass as a resource isn't necessarily the wrong general idea.
But it might offset other carbon based fuels. I was just trying to think of a use for that massive blob to get rid of it.
CO2 may be a threat down the road, but what if this blob chokes the oceans in 3 to 5 years? It's growing fast.
(citation needed)
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/19/1035889/kelp-car...
can't wait to hear this on blast for 5 years