A U.S. marine scientist, Jennifer Purcell of Western Washington University, has found a correlation between warming and jellyfish on a much larger scale, in at least 11 locations, including the Mediterranean and North seas, and Chesapeake and Narragansett bays.
China's coastal waters offer a perfect breeding ground: Agricultural and sewage runoff are spurring plankton growth, and fish catches are declining. The waters of the Yellow Sea, meanwhile, have warmed as much as 1.7 degrees C (3 degrees F) over the past quarter-century.
SHOOT: They use the Polar Bear to petition for climate change, but I think the jellyfish is more appropriate. It's less cuddly, more alien and as such, appropriately scary. And I do believe we ought to have the fear factor in our imaginations frightened, rather than tippy toed around as has been the trend thus far. Otherwise we face wrenching change, not just in reality but as our perceptions of the real world are forced to align to brutal self evident truth.
This year's jellyfish swarm is one of the worst he has seen, Hamano said. Once considered a rarity occurring every 40 years, they are now an almost annual occurrence along several thousand kilometers (miles) of Japanese coast, and far beyond Japan.
Scientists believe climate change — the warming of oceans — has allowed some of the almost 2,000 jellyfish species to expand their ranges, appear earlier in the year and increase overall numbers, much as warming has helped ticks, bark beetles and other pests to spread to new latitudes.
The gelatinous seaborne creatures are blamed for decimating fishing industries in the Bering and Black seas, forcing the shutdown of seaside power and desalination plants in Japan, the Middle East and Africa, and terrorizing beachgoers worldwide, the U.S. National Science Foundation says.
"The Chinese people say they will think about this after they get rich, but it might be too late by then," he said.
|
clipped from news.yahoo.com
No comments:
Post a Comment