Ocean Dead Zones Quotes

What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range, admire? Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator's projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and islands, its persistent formation of homothetic islands, peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents, gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, Artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the well by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe), numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90 percent of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.

Is it more comforting to think that the Permian catastrophe was caused by the unlikely convergence of a series of events or by a single nefarious villain? In a time when anthropogenic emissions of sulfur and chlorine match or exceed volcanic releases, when human carbon dioxide production outstrips natural rates by a factor of ten, and when growing areas of the world's oceans are becoming dead zones as a result of sewage and fertilizer runoff, I'm not sure. More recent records of climate instability are equally sobering.

Nature is complex, functioning at a level beyond our perception. If basic degenerative diseases go down, the demands for pharmaceuticals are lower. If children have better nutrition, they have a greater capacity to learn. If people have greater intelligence, the better our political debates will be. If we’re not using nitrogen-heavy fertilizers, we won’t have dead zones in the oceans. We can solve a lot of systemic problems through agriculture.

He realized the human genome, which is essentially the entirety of our heredity information, which programs cell growth, was changing, becoming corrupted.” “By what?” “By what?” Jenkins laughed. “By everything. By what we’d already done to the earth, and by all that we would do in the coming centuries. Mammal extinction. Deforestation. Loss of polar sea ice. Ozone. Increased carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. Acid rain. Ocean dead zones. Overfishing. Offshore oil drilling. Wars. The creation of a billion gasoline-burning automobiles. The nuclear disasters—Fukushima, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl. The two-thousand-plus intentional nuclear bomb detonations in the name of weapons testing. Toxic waste dumping. Exxon Valdez. BP’s Gulf oil spill. All the poisons we put into our food and water every day. “Since the Industrial Revolution, we’ve treated our world like it was a hotel room and we were rock stars. But we aren’t rock stars. In the scheme of evolutionary forces, we are a weak, fragile species. Our genome is corruptible, and we so abused this planet that we ultimately corrupted that precious DNA blueprint that makes us human.

None of these environmental problems is now more widespread and difficult to control than the creation of large dead zones in coastal waters. Nitrogen leached into streams is transported into ponds and lakes, eventually reaching the shallow coastal ocean waters, where it supports the excessive growth of algae. When these algae die and sink to the bottom, their decomposition consumes dissolved oxygen and leaves the water anoxic, suffocating fish and marine invertebrates. These dead zones are now found in the Gulf of Mexico and along many European and East Asian shorelines. Nitrogen oxide and nitrogen dioxide released from fertilization and converted to nitrates in atmospheric reactions contribute to acidified precipitation (the phenomenon popularly known as acid rain, whose generation is dominated by the emissions of sulfur oxides).

The number of fish has declined by 90 percent in one century. In 1950, 19 million tons of seafood were harvested from the sea; in 1997, this became 93 tons. Since then, it has been going down continuously. There are parts of the ocean where not a single fish can be found—genuine dead zones. By 2010, over 75 percent of marine ecosystems were considered exhausted.

most large-fish species, including cod, marlin, swordfish, and tuna, are critically endangered, and huge dead zones are appearing in our oceans, silent places devoid of life. It