Blue whales are going eerily silent—and scientists say it’s a warning sign
Blue whales are going eerily silent—and scientists say it’s a warning sign
Blue whales are going eerily silent—and scientists say it’s a warning sign
Beneath the ocean's surface, a symphony ripples and rolls, ricochets and hums—and whales pour their songs into the deep soundscape like streams of molten silver.
Deep within the noise, a 32-mile-long cable stretches out from the California coastline along the seafloor, tethered to the ground 3,000 feet below the surface. At its end is a two-inch-wide metal cylinder standing on three legs. This hydrophone, an underwater microphone, can record and trace the ocean’s shifting harmonies for years on end.
In a study published earlier this year, which traced more than six years of acoustic monitoring in the central California Current Ecosystem, Ryan and a team of researchers found clear patterns in whale song across seasons and years. By chance, the recordings began during a massive marine heatwave unlike anything seen before in the region.
The study documented whale songs beginning in July 2015, and revealed that different species responded differently. Humpbacks have a more diverse diet and were able to adapt to harsh conditions; their songs didn’t change. But blue and fin whales feed almost exclusively on krill, and their songs were detected less often than years prior.
The heatwave reduced the food whales rely on and triggered harmful changes in ocean chemistry, allowing toxic algae to bloom. “It caused the most widespread poisoning of marine mammals ever documented. These were hard times for whales,” says Ryan.
As prey became scarce, blue whale vocalizations dropped by nearly 40 percent alongside a collapse in krill and anchovy populations, the recent study showed.
Wait until it's all gone...
Not just whales, not just corals, but whole jungles, whole biomes, whole fields of the crops we depend on to eat, just crumbled and dead, unable to breathe in the heat.
Silent dead forests, sterile anoxic oceans or ones choked with algae and muck, starving people in desperate mobs a million strong, with no one to bury them when they fall. Hurricanes and dust storms over abandoned cities. Whole species, whole categories of life that can't survive the pace of change and harsh conditions that are coming. It's not a movie, it's not a story. There are people already alive today who will see it unless something massive changes. Probably even if it does.
What did you do? I didn't do anything today to stop it. We should be.
☝ they're not kidding.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7795586/
Plants, like all organisms, can only survive within a specific temperature range. Take a forest or jungle or some region of ocean plantlife, and in each you've got variety of plants with a similar threshold... crank that heat up and there comes a point where a lot of them just die.
So... things like an entire jungle just collapsing could happen kinda suddenly.
Comically, there is a Scientifically-Testable-Prediction in the Christian bible's book of Revelation, about ecological-collapse:
it stated that both marine & terrestrial food-webs would collapse, simultaneously.
That wasn't possible before the Industrial Revolution, & ( in my opinion ) the Industrial Revolution became inevitable as a result of the Roman Empire ( which was its own Industrial Revolution, in my eyes ).
It just took 2 millenia to happen, is all..
So, this century ( closer to the end of it ) we get to see exactly what John of Patmos predicted, about 2 millenia ago..
Won't stop the "that can't happen" zealots from prohibiting that such an ancient prediction could ever come true, will it?
There's an American Indian saying: only when all the food is gone, will Whites understand that money isn't food. ( very coarse paraphrase ).
Identity's actually the root problem: All non-Indigenous cultures, that I know-of, have prejudice against Indigenous cultures/people, along the lines of..
" they are native to Earth, we are divorced from Nature/Earth, & that makes us better than their kind. "
Certainly what I grew-up in..
it's lie-based, though: as 1 American Indian man pointed-out: "We're ALL children of Mother Earth."
How the hell could that statement be somehow "wrong", as it is deemed to be, among most "civilized" cultures??
Identity-based-"validity" is the root problem.
India's "advaita"/nonduality's a good direction: understanding that the ecology we are participating in, affects us, is affected by us, & it is symbiosis between it & us, not some kind of "oh, we'll just buy a replacement planet when we kill this one" kind of reality..
would be progress!
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