The Hidden Influence Marine Life Has on Our Climate | Into the Blue Podcast

[@julianflood8150]

For 20 years I had a job which fairly frequently involved flying at low level over various seas -- 'low level' was down to 100 ft. Even at the speeds we were flying there was adequate time to study the surface and I became interested in its varying textures. Now retired I've been trying to make sense of the observations I made which may be relevant to your areas of expertise. The oceans are appallingly polluted. This shows as area where waves are suppressed, surfaces have an oily appearance and large areas reflect light in unusual ways. I have no doubt there is an official term for this, but I think of them as 'smooths' for obvious reasons. They are everywhere, from Mediterranean bays smoothed by the sun oil on bathers' bodies (the little morning waves are reduced and the smoothed areas drift out from the shore), to the Red Sea baking with spilt oil from shore to shore. I have, you will be unsurprised to know, a guess about what if happening -- Feynman said that science begins with a guess and he gave us permission to guess even when our only qualification to guess is an physics A level which is decades out of date: let me be brief. Ben Franklin described smooths in the 18th century. Lord Rayleigh measured the size of an oil molecule by its spread on water. On a flight to Madeira I observed a fractured smooth that extended from abeam Porto to a couple of hundred miles short of the island. literally tens of thousands of square miles of the ocean surface. The briefest internet search will find images of smooths on rivers, lakes (pleasingly, Broad Lake in the grounds of the UEA shows a minor example). A smoothed water surface has lowered albedo: warming. An oiled ocean surface has reduced evaporation and produces fewer salt aerosols as wave breaking is suppressed, again warming. Polluted and confined water bodies e.g Lake Tanganyika warm at anomalous rates as does Baikal, parts of the North Sea, the eastern end of the Mediterranean etc etc. The oceans are being fed with nutrients from land disturbance, sewage and farming run-off which is feeding oleaginous plankton which add to smooths. My guess. Anthropogenic Pollution Warming if a possibility and should be examined. Over to you.JF