Scientists build new atlas of ocean’s oxygen-starved waters
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Re: Scientists build new atlas of ocean’s oxygen-starved waters
#2It is a brilliant insight to reinterpret faulty oxygen measurements to extract a valid signal.
I wonder if anoxic regions could be made useful somehow.
Re: Scientists build new atlas of ocean’s oxygen-starved waters
#3I assume various organisms have evolved to detect low oxygen content of water, it would be interesting to find out more about this.
Re: Scientists build new atlas of ocean’s oxygen-starved waters
#4It is a brilliant insight to reinterpret faulty oxygen measurements to extract a valid signal. I wonder if anoxic regions could be made useful somehow.
I wouldn’t say the oxygen measurements are faulty, just hard to interpret.
Re: Scientists build new atlas of ocean’s oxygen-starved waters
#5If this is the case then the benthic sediments would be of food that hadn’t been eaten far higher up in the water column.
Wouldn’t it be fairly pristine? Ships that sunk, and or whales and fish that expired.
Are whales in the sea referred to as megafauna, or is fauna just for land animals?
Where these waters become more oxygenated they would be a lot more life, oxygen permitting, wouldn’t there?
Re: Scientists build new atlas of ocean’s oxygen-starved waters
#6The good old GMT, it seems. I remember this color gradient.
Re: Scientists build new atlas of ocean’s oxygen-starved waters
#7If this is the case then the benthic sediments would be of food that hadn’t been eaten far higher up in the water column. Wouldn’t it be fairly pristine? Ships that sunk, and or whales and fish that expired. Are whales in the sea referred to as megafauna, or is fauna just for land animals? Where these waters become more oxygenated they would be a lot more life, oxygen permitting, wouldn’t there?
Whales are megafauna, yes. Fauna means anything in the Kingdom Animalia.
Re: Scientists build new atlas of ocean’s oxygen-starved waters
#8The team reasoned that, if sensors showed a constant, unchanging value of oxygen in a continuous, vertical section of the ocean, regardless of the true value, then it would likely be a sign that oxygen had bottomed out, and that the section was part of an oxygen-deficient zone.
Did they bother testing this idea at all? It's a hypothesis absolutely essential to their study. There must be some method of accurately measuring oxygen at various depths, even if it isn't practical to deploy it across the ocean. You could for example spectrographically analyze a set of sample bottles for oxygen content, take a series of measurements of the water column, and then analyze the bottles afterward to determine how much oxygen leached out of them.
Re: Scientists build new atlas of ocean’s oxygen-starved waters
#9If this is the case then the benthic sediments would be of food that hadn’t been eaten far higher up in the water column. Wouldn’t it be fairly pristine? Ships that sunk, and or whales and fish that expired. Are whales in the sea referred to as megafauna, or is fauna just for land animals? Where these waters become more oxygenated they would be a lot more life, oxygen permitting, wouldn’t there?
If it supports very little life then there's very little life to die there and sink.
Re: Scientists build new atlas of ocean’s oxygen-starved waters
#10If this is the case then the benthic sediments would be of food that hadn’t been eaten far higher up in the water column. Wouldn’t it be fairly pristine? Ships that sunk, and or whales and fish that expired. Are whales in the sea referred to as megafauna, or is fauna just for land animals? Where these waters become more oxygenated they would be a lot more life, oxygen permitting, wouldn’t there?
If it supports very little life then there's very little life to die there and sink.
There’s Oxygen near the surface just not further down in the depths.
Whales could swim through an area since the surface to breathe, but could pop their clogs at any time (I assume).