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A teaspoon of seawater typically contains about fifty million viruses
Well yeah our water companies keep dumping raw sewage into them
Sharks are older than trees and the north star.
And Saturn’s rings!
And some living sharks are more than 200 years old, probably.
The perfect killing machine
When a whale dies and its corpse falls to the bottom of the ocean, entire ecosystems rapidly develop around eating every part of it due to how scarce resources are in the deep ocean. This phenomenon is called a “whale fall” and it’s a major source of energy for deep ocean ecosystems.
Sometimes I wonder if a shipping container full of billionaires would have a similar effect.
Or a submarine.
We have to find out. We need to try it immediately to see what happens. That’s just basic science
That seems like a waste of a perfectly good shipping container.
Why don’t we just use environmentally friendly hemp ropes and locally sourced boulders?
Locally sourcing boulders over the Marianas Trench is going to be such a pain. I’m pretty sure the environmental benefits will outweigh importing some nice basalt from Hawaii before we leave out.
Whale whale whale, what do we have here? - deep ocean crabs
Life is worth living today thanks to this comment
Billy Ocean has an honorary doctorate of music from the University of Westminster.
Global warming has a slower effect on the oceans than in air temperatures, yet we’ve passed a tipping point where many sea regions are consistently 3C warmer than pre-industrial era, and they are helping air temperatures set records too. Even since 2016, summer tropical North Atlantic ocean has been over 2C warmer than 2016. This region is also called “hurricane alley”, and ocean heat has an exponential effect on hurricane strength.
Okay that’s a bit too scary 😭
My theory on tipping points with ocean to air temperatures is that El ninos cause a step up in air temperatures now. This happened in 2015/2016, where air temperatures stayed above 2015 levels every year afterwards, even if 2016 record stayed up for a long period. 2023/2024 was another step up. Ocean and air temperatures help each other set summer records, and that ocean heat persists into fall/winter to help moderate winter air temperatures, that makes spring have a head start on new summer records, or at least keep the new el-nino set baseline, until another step up the next el-nino.
I have thalassophobia, im from a beach country and im like “nah I’ll stick to the pool”
Fuck no. You can’t Breathe underwater. The ocean is essentially space but with actual monsters in it. And if you can’t see the bottom, fuck no I’m not going in there
It’s easier to survive in the space as in the deep sea, aspaceship only has to support 1 atm pressure of the cabine. in the deep sea the pressure increase 1 atm every 10 meters until more than 1000 atm on the ground. A leak in the spaceship is bad, but in the deep sea you’re dead before you can say fu…
The ocean is a desert with its life underground and the perfect disguise above.
Earth’s atmosphere is an ocean of gas. The ocean is an atmosphere of liquid. Words are made up.
Yea, for a reason.
There are entire levels of the ocean where ecosystem is fed on the slow sinking of dying animals.
Cycle of life is pretty badass.
Not a fact but a question:
How do whales keep water out of their anuses when they are deep diving?
Whales have been known to dive almost 2 miles deep and at that depth you’re looking at almost 300 atmospheres of pressure and a whale’s sphincter has to be strong enough to resist that.
They don’t. That’s their kink.
Same.
I had to look it up out of curiosity. The rib cage and lungs of sperm whales are adapted to collapse under pressure, squeezing all the air in the lungs into a small space and increasing internal cavity pressure.
Wait, why didn’t they get the bends?
They can if they do too many dives in rapid succession.
You get the bends by having a lot of nitrogen dissolved on your bloodstream due to the pressure. So it’s a function of how much nitrogen you breathe, how much pressure you’re breathing it at, and the total amount of blood (and some other tissues) in your body that can absorb that nitrogen. Divers get the bends because they are taking multiple breaths of air under pressure, there is multiple lung volumes of nitrogen cycling though the diver. Whales and other diving animals don’t typically “hold” their breath when they dive, but if they did, it would only be 1 breath of air for the entire dive. Air in the lungs is bouyancy they don’t want and can potentially injure them when it re-expands. Most marine diving animals will saturate their blood and muscles with oxygen at the surface and then dive and exhale.
They know to ascend slowly to avoid it, but it can absolutely happen.
https://www.whoi.edu/press-room/news-release/how-do-marine-mammals-avoid-getting-the-bends/
Ty!
I think that also happens to humans, but without being adapted to it, it’s a one way squeeze.
Like a tube of toothpaste
Not as minty
Depends what you eat.
Whales suffocate to death; they don’t drown.
Human breathing is controlled by the autonomic nervous system. We have to hold our breath on purpose to stop ourselves from automatically breathing. This makes us passive breathers. Whales, however, are active breathers. They must choose to inhale which is why they can sleep without sucking in air. When they get too old, sick, or weak to surface, they suffocate.
Bonus fact: whales can’t breathe through their mouths; it goes straight to the stomach. The blowhole is the only respiratory tract.
Bonus bonus: a blue whale’s throat is so small it could choke to death on a grapefruit.
Bonus bonus: a blue whale’s throat is so small it could choke to death on a grapefruit.
I’m sure their throat can be blocked that way; but if they can’t breathe through their mouth anyway, is it actually choking? Or just terminally blocked?
Fair point. I didn’t even consider the ramifications of wording it like that instead of just saying it has a small throat. I tend to use analogies a lot
Nah, it makes sense, and ice heard this phrasing before - just always wondered if they meant the poor whale couldn’t breathe, or basically just had indigestion!
4" / 10cm throat
There are plenty of fish in the sea.
I wonder if fish say “there are plenty of humans on the land”
Blue
Incorrect.
Wine-dark.
We are killing the ocean by increasingly acidifying it. This has been known by scientists for decades.
Ocean acidification occurs because the ocean serves as a carbon sink. Excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere forms weak carbonic acid in ocean water. The ocean has historically been slightly basic, and as it inches towards a neutral pH, it makes it impossible for things like oysters to form their shells.
One big problem is that it’s one of the biggest carbon sinks. It’s keeping that greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere. However - as you might notice if you leave a can of Coke out on a hot day - the solubility of gases in liquids decreases when it’s hotter. The world heats up because of greenhouse gasses, less greenhouse gasses can be stored in the ocean and re-enter the atmosphere, which heats the world up more…
Then we also have the lovely “ice albedo” positive feedback loop - dark ocean water absorbs more of the suns radiation, sea ice reflects more of it. Sea ice melts as earth heats up, exposing dark ocean which absorbs more heat and melts more ice….
Tl;Dr
We fucked yo
Pretty much. We set off several positive feedback loops and punctured the equilibrium, and nature’s going to have to find a new one. Whether or not that can support life as we know it know is up in the air.
(I didn’t even mention phytoplankton die offs - a lot of the oxygen produced on earth is from photosynthesis happening in the ocean - not from terrestrial plants. So you also have less of a carbon sink in that process as well.)
When I was a child, long road trips would leave the front grill of our car caked with bugs. When I’d hunt for dandelions with my siblings, leaning close to the ground revealed a world just teeming with activity.
Now - where are the bugs? Especially with how difficult it is to identify insect species, we’ve probably lost hundreds of thousands of bugs that were never named or studied. How critical were those bugs to their ecosystems?
It’s difficult to motivate people to care about species of phytoplankton or ants though. Even the “save the bees” thing got twisted into a celebration of non-indigenous species that were brought in for agricultural purposes (wasps are critical for pollination, but not as cute as honey bees I guess.) The more you study ecology, the more you realize how complicated and interlocking it is, the more you realize that most human beings cannot be brought to care without substantial changes to our education system.
Well at least there’s not a fuckton of methane hydrates on the ocean floor that are now releasing a greenhouse gas 30 times more potent than CO2 refrom the ocean floor as the water gets warmer. And that isn’t a self-feeding loop that means it’s probably too late to save ourselves now.
Because that would be bad.
Methane at least breaks down faster than CO2. Heavier, so stronger effects, but at least the CH4 breaks down after a decade or so instead of centuries.
Well, changing it dramatically. It’s going to stay within historical ranges where ocean life flourished, but without any exoskeleton-heavy animals like corals in the mix.
But have you thought of the benefit? Free club soda!
All crabs are now soft shell crabs! Think of the deliciousness!
Did you know fish fuck in the ocean? Remember that, when you go for a swim.
Assert dominance: Fuck the fish.
Thalassaphobia is a real thing
… And there’s a community for it
I, for one, think it’s completely fucking reasonable to afraid of deep, dark water. Phobia my ass.
Depends, some pictures I see that get posted on places like that look perfectly fine to swim across to me. Like it’s just the sea in a calm day and you can’t see the bottom. Actually the same happens at the beach where I live but that is because the water is so cloudy, slopes off steeply though, especially at high tide. So usually can’t stand up except right at the shore line.
Some phobias are irrational but that’s not part of the meaning of the word
