Since 2015, there have been many large-scale deaths of marine animals along the Pacific coast, including California Thousands of sea lions , seals, 45 whales stranded deaths, nearly 100,000 seabirds on the west coast of the United States, a large number of sea otters deaths, and a large number of starfish and deep-sea red crab were washed to the coast, etc.
The team of Professor Darn Jaff, a meteorologist at the University of Washington, USA, has been tracking and studying these phenomena for several years. Researchers found that these animals may have died due to the damage to the ecological chain. The culprit was the large-scale outbreak of toxic algae on the west coast of the United States. The reason behind it is a large area of abnormal warm water in the Pacific caused by various complex factors. Scientists call it "The Blob". When it was the largest, it covered about 9 million square kilometers of sea areas from Mexico to Alaska, and even had a serious impact on the inland, causing the average temperature in the western region to rise by 1 to 6℃ relative to normal.
Jaff’s team has been monitoring the ozone levels in the United States since 2004. They found that ozone water level seems to have some connection with stains, so they used multiple satellites to track temperature fluctuations in the Pacific Ocean, and used sensor data to draw the stain map and its fluctuation period in unprecedented detail. The results confirmed the previous conjecture: higher ozone levels correspond to areas under the stain effect.
Under normal circumstances, wind runs along the ocean surface and pushes the top layer off the coast, and the colder seawater rise underwater brings important nutrients and balances the temperature. However, during the peak of the stain, the temperature rises on the surface of the ocean causes the air above to heat up, weakening the coastal winds and unable to push the warm top of the Pacific Ocean away from the coastline, thus producing low winds, few clouds, and sunny weather, thus producing more ozone. Ozone is formed by oxygen molecules being decomposed into oxygen atoms through high-energy ultraviolet radiation, and then combined with another oxygen molecule. In stratosphere , which is twenty or thirty kilometers high in the atmosphere, ozone can absorb a large amount of ultraviolet rays in the sunlight, thereby protecting the animals and plants on the earth's surface from high-energy radiation. However, on the surface of the earth, ozone is far more active than oxygen and is a strong oxidant, which is harmful to animals, plants and many materials, especially to the eyes and respiratory tract, leading to serious respiratory dysfunction, including pneumonia, asthma and bronchitis, which in severe cases can cause pulmonary bleeding and death. Therefore, recent studies have listed ozone as an air pollutant with the same harm as PM2.5. The ozone in the lower air is mainly derived from the photochemical smoke generated by the hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxides in industrial exhaust gases and automobile exhausts under sunlight.
The huge abnormal stains in the Pacific Ocean cause sea water temperature to rise, toxic algae burst, breaking the ocean ecological chain. The causes of the intensification of stains are different from the interaction between different warming factors, which is difficult to clarify, and the greenhouse gas emissions generated by human activities may be to blame. These factors have their own rhythms of operation, and now they seem to be synchronized, just like the second hand, minute hand and hour hand overlap at midnight, the resulting collective effect is very powerful, disrupting the marine ecosystem and causing large-scale deaths of marine animals. If air pollution continues to intensify and the stain effect continues to deteriorate, can humans escape the fate of marine animals?
The study was published in the February 15th Journal of Geophysical Research.
Reference materials: http://www.concordregister.com/the-blob-of-warm-pacific-water-increased-ozone-levels/
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