Mother Jones: "The Last Days of the Ocean"

A frightening series of articles in the March/April 2006 issue of Mother Jones. Some excerpts....

From "The Fate of the Ocean" by Julia Whitty:

In the Antarctic Peninsula, lubricated by summer temperatures registering 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than 40 years ago, ancient ice shelves are disintegrating, enabling the glaciers behind them to surge into the sea with a rapidity startling to scientists. Consequently, fears are growing that if the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, currently contained by the Ronne and Ross ice shelves, ever surges, it would raise sea levels by as much as 23 feet worldwide.

From "On Thin Ice" by Marla Cone:

Several hundred of the industrialized world's most toxic chemicals, especially PCBs and organochlorine pesticides such as DDT, have transformed Svalbard and much of the Arctic into a giant chemical repository, and polar bears into its unintentional lab rats....

Scientific studies suggest that these extraordinary loads of chemicals are weakening polar bears, culling the old and the young. Their immune cells and antibodies have been suppressed, and their sex hormones, thyroid hormones, and even their bone composition have been altered.

In "Sound Effects" Amos Kenigsberg writes that the "US Navy may soon get the green light to deploy a new, high-tech sonar system in 80 percent of the world's oceans, despite evidence that it may pose a lethal danger to whales and other marine creatures." Says researcher Ken Balcomb, deploying these sonars "will cause uncountable whale deaths."

For a field guide to fish that are rapidly disappearing from ourt seas, see "Failing Fish" in the same series of articles.

For a related article from National Geographic, see "Giant Catfish Critically Endangered".

And from National Geographic in 2003, "Big-Fish Stocks Fall 90 Percent Since 1950, Study Says". It's now three years later. Do you suppose anything's improved?

LP