Saving Seafood

19 Ways Arctic Climate Change Could Unleash a Global Catastrophe

December 1, 2016 — Scientists have identified 19 “tipping points” that could radically change Arctic societies and environmental communities—and potentially the rest of the planet.

Those tipping points include things we’ve already heard a lot about, such as Arctic sea ice loss and the collapse of the Greenland ice sheet, as well as potential crises such as fishery collapses, a reduction of oxygen in the ocean, and the transformation of tundra ecosystems into woodlands.

“Some of these things have happened; some are more speculative,” said Garry Peterson of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, coeditor of the report, which was released last week by the center and the Stockholm Environment Institute. “Even if a bunch of these tipping points don’t happen, you’ve still got a lot to worry about.”

The biggest open question is how all these individual tipping points, also known as regime shifts, could magnify one another. “How regime shifts interact with one another is poorly understood,” Johan Rockström, executive director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, said in a statement. “If multiple regime shifts reinforce each other, the results could be potentially catastrophic. The variety of effects that we could see means that Arctic people and policies must prepare for surprise. We also expect that some of those changes will destabilize the regional and global climate, with potentially major impacts.”

Read the full story at takepart

US Wants to Strengthen Agreement to Ban Arctic Ocean Fishing

October 7, 2016 — The United States is trying to broker an agreement between a host of nations to prohibit unregulated fishing in the international waters of the Arctic Ocean.

Such an agreement would be binding and include more countries than a non-binding agreement that the U.S. entered into with Norway, Denmark, Russia and Canada last year to avoid fishing in the area.

Adm. Robert Papp, the U.S. special representative for the Arctic, said a binding, multinational agreement would prevent fishing in the Arctic high seas before scientists can determine what is sustainable. He said the issue is especially important as Arctic ice melts, making the area more open to potential commercial fishing.

“We don’t want people fishing in there until we have the science of what’s happening,” Papp said. “It’s a pre-emptive effort to be able to sustain fisheries into the future.”

Read the full story from the Associated Press at ABC News

Nations negotiate fishing in Arctic high seas

April 29, 2016 — Last week, delegates from six Arctic nations and other countries with major fishing fleets met in Washington, D.C., to discuss plans to prohibit commercial fishing in the central Arctic Ocean until scientists can find out more about the fish stocks and how they are changing.

“Fishing shouldn’t occur up there until we have the science and the rules in place,” said Scott Highleyman, director of the International Arctic Program at The Pew Charitable Trusts.

No commercial fishing occurs in the high seas of the Arctic Ocean yet. The 2.8m square kilometer area (1.08m sq. mile) region surrounds the North Pole. It is referred to as the high seas because it lies beyond the 200 nautical mile limit of the Arctic nations. Without regulations, it is permissible for fishing fleets to cast their nets within these waters.

Until recently, the area has been largely impenetrable to fishing fleets. According to satellite records spanning 1979-2000, this high seas area remained ice covered throughout the year, even during the summer. But in the past decade, summer sea ice has retreated dramatically.

During the summers of 2007 and 2012, as much as 40 percent of the Central Arctic Ocean – particularly the waters adjacent to Canada, Russia and the United States – was open water, Highleyman said. Permanent ice has given way to navigable seas and seasonal ice, he added.

In August 2015, the five Arctic countries with coastlines bordering the Arctic Ocean – Canada, Denmark, Norway, Russia and the United States – signed a voluntary agreement to bar commercial fishing in the Central Arctic Ocean.

Read the full story at United Press International

The Lost Whaling Fleet is finally found

January 18, 2016 — During the summer of 1871, a mini-armada of American whaleships hunting for bowhead whales in the Arctic Ocean gambled against the weather, and lost. As the fleet sailed north, the temperature plummeted, and unrelenting winds pushed massive ice floes toward the coast, which first pinned the whaleships in place, and then began crushing their hulls. In the end, 32 whaleships were destroyed in what became the greatest single disaster in the history of American whaling.

For nearly a century and a half, the remains of those ships were hidden from view, but no longer. This past summer, archaeologists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, using sonar and sensing technology, found the hulls of two whaling ships in the same area where the disaster occurred. These ships, whose discovery NOAA only recently made public, are almost certainly part of that ill-fated fleet.

The story of the so-called Lost Whaling Fleet is one of the most dramatic in America’s long and turbulent history of whaling. Since the mid-1800s, American whalers had been pursuing bowhead whales in the Arctic. These massive creatures, which can grow more than 60 feet long and weigh up to 100 tons, yielded as much as 300 barrels of oil, widely used for lighting.

But by the time the whaling fleet headed north in 1871, the whale oil market had been virtually eliminated. After the discovery of petroleum in 1859, an ever-increasing amount of that “black gold” was pumped from the ground and refined into a flood of cheap kerosene that ultimately displaced whale oil and other illuminants.

What the whalers of 1871 wanted from the bowheads was not oil, but the hundreds of strips of baleen that were hanging down from the roof of their mouths. Whales use this keratinous material, which when viewed from the side resembles a comb with hairy fringes on the inner edge, for feeding. Baleen was valuable because it was made into hoops for hooped skirts, and stays for stomach-tightening and chest-crushing corsets, which were fashionable at the time. Bowhead whales were especially prized, because they had the longest baleen of any whale, reaching lengths of nearly 14 feet.

Read the full story at the Providence Journal

 

US Proposed International Agreement to Prevent Unregulated Arctic Fishing

WASHINGTON — August 31, 2015 — While commercial fishing is not yet occurring in the central Arctic Ocean, Kerry said that unregulated fishing could “ramp up soon” as ice sheets melt due to global warming.

“The United States is proposing an international agreement to prevent unregulated fishing for the time being,” Kerry said at an international Arctic summit in Alaska.

Read the full story from Sputnik News