Our oceans are under attack.
Contaminants pour in from everywhere. Plastic and chemical pollution overflow from cities and farms. Discarded waste materials come from the clothing industry. Trash and netting from fishing boats, illegal fishing and over-fishing create traps. Deep-sea mining and drilling by governments and industry release spills and sludge.
“It’s hard to care about something that you can’t see,” said Wendy Schmidt, co-founder of the Schmidt Ocean Institute, speaking at Northwestern University on May 7. “It’s even harder to care about something you don’t understand.”
In her speech, “The Low Down on the High Seas: What We Don’t Know About the Ocean Can Kill Us,” Schmidt presented optimistic approaches to address critical ocean issues such as oil spill, micro-plastic, acidification, their impact on industries, and the framework of viewing the ocean as part of an interactive living system.
What might ultimately be called “the worst oil disaster in the U.S. history,” according to Schmidt, was the massive offshore oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico caused by the Deepwater Horizon Platform blowing up in April 2010.
“It was really a crude oil tsunami that raged unchecked for more than two months,” said Schmidt, who responded to the crisis by funding her first ocean health XPRIZE, a $1.4 million competition designed to inspire a new generation of innovative solutions that aim at speeding the pace of cleaning up seawater surface oil resulting from spillage from ocean platforms, tankers, and other sources.
Elastec, Inc. won the first place with their patented Grooved Disc skimming technology, achieving oil recovery efficiency more than three times the industry’s previous best oil recovery rate tested in controlled conditions. Elastec later released a scaled version of their winning technology into the marketplace. “Incentive prices do work in ways that markets do not, alone,” Schmidt said.
Schmidt also spent time discussing plastics and micro-fibers that are filling fresh waters, streams, rivers, and the oceans at a disturbing rate.
Since 1950 there was a sharp growth in plastic production. By 2015, the world has been producing 222 million metrics of plastic every year. Evidence shows plastic pollution is everywhere in the ocean, according to Schmidt, even in the sea ice and deepest trenches.
Food packaging such as soda bottles and plastic straws comprises 40 percent of garbage collected from deep oceans. “Five hundred million plastic drinking straws are used one time in the U.S. every year, and one of the top items found in the beach cleanups,” Schmidt says, “We can all ditch that plastic straw today.”
Concentration of micro-plastics are found in sea salt, drinking water, and of course, species of wildlife including fish and shellfish that we consume daily. According to a calculation by scientists at Ghent University in Belgium, shellfish lovers are eating up to 11,000 plastic fragments in their seafood each year. And the risks it poses to our bodies are only beginning to be studied.
At the speech, Schmidt quoted a recent released United Nations report showing that human actions threaten more species with global extinction now than ever before. Approximately 1 million species already face extinction, many within the next decades, unless action is taken to reduce the intensity of drivers of biodiversity loss.
A rise in ocean water temperatures due to climate change is contributing to a further expansion in oxygen-depleted dead zones that are uninhabitable for marine life. “Last year there were more than 500 low oxygen zones located around coast lines of the world, a number that has multiplied 10 folds since the 1950s, and that’s only where we’ve monitored,” Schmidt said.
Sea temperature rise brings about significant economic losses, such as in the fisheries industry, in addition to ecosystem damage. Warmer waters have resulted in the explosion of the purple sea urchins. They thrive along the California coast, devour the kelp forests, leaving nothing for red sea urchins, disrupting a whole fishing industry that’s dependent on the red sea urchins to prepare them as “uni” in sushi restaurants.
Since the 1870s, the pH of surface ocean waters has fallen by 0.1 pH units. “That may not sound like much,” Schmidt said, however, this change represents a 30 percent increase in acidity.
Today’s ocean acidifying is happening 10 times faster than at any time in the last 55 million years, putting polar ecosystems at risk. Ten years ago, oyster farmers on the Oregon coast saw a 70-80 percent increase in larvae deaths, due to more acidic waters there. In recent years, there have been near total failures of developing oysters in both aquaculture facilities and natural ecosystems on the West Coast.
The increasing ocean acidification has been shown to significantly reduce the ability of reef-building corals to produce their skeletons. As a result, coral reefs may start to erode faster than they are being built, compromising the long-term viability of these ecosystems and impacting the estimated one-million species that depend on coral reef habitat to survive.
Schmidt recalled that her generation was raised in a throw-away culture, where Life Magazine in 1955 celebrated the new disposable household products and processed meals as innovations for freeing housewives from cleaning and cooking.
“Today, 64 years later, people continue to miss the link between the ocean health and systems of their everyday life,” she said.
It requires new tools to actively explore a different way for people to see and understand the ocean and bring the story of ocean threat and ocean health to new audiences. This is the work of the Schmidt Ocean Institute.
Through the operation of Falkor, a research vessel with a mobile platform to advance ocean exploration and discovery, the institute uses open source data to catalyze the sharing of information about the oceans. Since 2013, more than 500 scientists from 165 institutions and 30 countries have conducted research on R/V Falkor, and anyone interested can watch a livestream about the microbial mysteries observed during a cruise in the Gulf of California.
Schmidt has also extended her oceans-focused work to the sporting world through 11th Hour Racing, partnering with the 2017-2018 Volvo Ocean Race and the Vestas 11th Hour Racing team to put sustainability at the core of their operations, empowering the race managers and athletes to be leaders and spokespeople on restoring ocean health.
“If I succeeded in my messaging to you today, you’ll begin to think of the ocean not as individual bays and gulfs and inlets,” Schmidt concluded, “but as the force of nature it really is.”
Please visit here for more information on the Schmidt Ocean Institute.