A step over repopulating coral reefs

[WinkAllKerb'']

just a vid i wanted to share that might interest some peops around here:
 

 

Edited July 23, 2019 by WinkAllKerb''
pidgin english

[Vanamonde]

Some rare good environmental news.

[YNM]

Shouldn't this be on Science & Spaceflight ? This is good science. I honestly didn't know, despite living among the whole lot of them !

[Vanamonde]

Hmm. Actual science content? Okay, moved.

[tater]

That's cool.

[SuperFastJellyfish]

On 7/23/2019 at 2:47 AM, WinkAllKerb'' said:

just a vid i wanted to share that might interest some peops around here:
 

 

Thank you for this.  I've been to a coral shop a few times(years ago), and would have thought that this was already known because they sell coral fragments on little dime-sized mounts like they show in the video.

[mikegarrison]

I hate to say it, but as the ocean becomes more acidic due to the CO2, the corals just can't survive in it.

[steve_v]

34 minutes ago, mikegarrison said:

I hate to say it, but as the ocean becomes more acidic due to the CO2, the corals just can't survive in it.

Yeah, not to mention all the other species that will be unable to adapt fast enough to cope with our impact. Coral is just a canary in the coal mine, many more will follow.

Repopulating reefs is lovely and all, but it's also rather futile if we don't sort out the root-cause of the problem.

The #1 source of greenhouse gas emissions in my country recently promised to phase out coal by 2030. Frankly I feel like beating the CEO with a stick until they realise that that they've had 40 years warning already, time is up, and a ten-year plan is simply not acceptable any more.

Edited July 27, 2019 by steve_v

[kerbiloid]

Humanity should collect on HDD as much DNA codes as it can, as fifty years later it should start re-creating the Earth biosphere.

Of course, a creative GMO one.

Edited July 27, 2019 by kerbiloid

[steve_v]

18 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Humanity should collect on HDD as much DNA codes as it can, as fifty years later it should start re-creating the Earth biosphere.

We already are collecting DNA samples to some extent, but that's kinda like justifying burning down your house today because you have the blueprints to build another one at some undefined date in the future, while you have no timber to build it with.

[kerbiloid]

1 hour ago, steve_v said:

We already are collecting DNA samples to some extent, but that's kinda like justifying burning down your house today because you have the blueprints to build another one at some undefined date in the future, while you have no timber to build it with.

When the dungeon is burning, it's a time to save as much documents as you can.

[steve_v]

19 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

When the dungeon is burning, it's a time to save as much documents as you can.

I'd rather make an effort to put out the fire, but yeah, I get your point.

[YNM]

On 7/27/2019 at 1:45 PM, mikegarrison said:

I hate to say it, but as the ocean becomes more acidic due to the CO2, the corals just can't survive in it.

... maybe we should try not putting too much out ?

Also they're living on symbiotic algae... so perhaps they're ever so slightly sucking out the CO2. Isn't that where the carbonate comes from ?

[farmerben]

I love the part of the video where they have built a truss for branching coral.  There are several shots of it 1:04 is one.  

I want to use this technology to built caltrops against drag net fishermen.  

[mikegarrison]

9 hours ago, YNM said:

Also they're living on symbiotic algae... so perhaps they're ever so slightly sucking out the CO2. Isn't that where the carbonate comes from ?

The problem is that the shells they live in (aka the reef itself) is made of calcium carbonate. Yes, they need some carbon to make that, but unfortunately it is reactive with acid. As the oceans absorb CO2 from the air, they become ever more acidic. This is a problem for the coral.

[kerbiloid]

Next step of the evolution: soft chitin reefs made of crabs.

[magnemoe]

21 hours ago, mikegarrison said:

The problem is that the shells they live in (aka the reef itself) is made of calcium carbonate. Yes, they need some carbon to make that, but unfortunately it is reactive with acid. As the oceans absorb CO2 from the air, they become ever more acidic. This is a problem for the coral.

Corrals is also very sensitive to to low temperatures, at the Canaries islands outside of Morocco I dived at an corral reef remain or fossil, yes this is an place there you can celebrate Christmas in shorts but to cold for corrals. The red sea had the most amazing corrals I seen, Florida was an downer, I made an joke that sea horses was fantasy creatures less plausible than mermaids   

One issue with corals is that they might well be environmental markers but also that they repopulate after some years. Crisis reports from the great barrier reef start to get old after 40 years. 
That is one of the very few advantages of getting old while not being an elf (crossover to the https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/186713-what-trans-human-modifications-would-you-make/)
The number of doomsday prophets who dies of old age start to get amusing  and yes the trend is far older than printing  
 

[mikegarrison]

2 hours ago, magnemoe said:

The number of doomsday prophets who dies of old age start to get amusing

The problem with this line of thinking is the same as the error made by the Space Shuttle program when bits of foam kept hitting the shuttle or when the o-rings kept partially burning through. "There hasn't been any disaster yet, so ...."

It's really pretty scary to realize that in about 200 years we have raised the CO2 level of the Earth to concentrations higher than have been seen on the planet since about 16 million years ago -- sometime around when apes first started to be separate from whatever it is they evolved from. This is quite literally entirely out of previous human experience. And it just keeps getting further and further out of our experience band.

So just like the Space Shuttle, we can keep going until we know for sure that we've gone too far -- if we want to ensure that we will definitely go too far. The problem is, the carbon cycle is measured in centuries, so when we do go too far, we'll have to survive that for about a 1000 years before everything recovers. If we can. As George Carlin said, "Save the planet? The planet will be fine. It's the people who are #$@&ed."

I guess it's not personally a problem for me, though. By 2050 I'll be in my 80s, assuming I make it there at all. (And I don't have any kids to worry about either.)

[magnemoe]

3 hours ago, mikegarrison said:

The problem with this line of thinking is the same as the error made by the Space Shuttle program when bits of foam kept hitting the shuttle or when the o-rings kept partially burning through. "There hasn't been any disaster yet, so ...."

It's really pretty scary to realize that in about 200 years we have raised the CO2 level of the Earth to concentrations higher than have been seen on the planet since about 16 million years ago -- sometime around when apes first started to be separate from whatever it is they evolved from. This is quite literally entirely out of previous human experience. And it just keeps getting further and further out of our experience band.

So just like the Space Shuttle, we can keep going until we know for sure that we've gone too far -- if we want to ensure that we will definitely go too far. The problem is, the carbon cycle is measured in centuries, so when we do go too far, we'll have to survive that for about a 1000 years before everything recovers. If we can. As George Carlin said, "Save the planet? The planet will be fine. It's the people who are #$@&ed."

I guess it's not personally a problem for me, though. By 2050 I'll be in my 80s, assuming I make it there at all. (And I don't have any kids to worry about either.)

Ignore 200 because to much errors and low values focus on the last 50 or 75 years, and yes its an issue. 

My point however is that corrals is probably an bad biomarker as they are pretty hypochondriac, they tend to die off if you look at them the wrong way. 
This tend to be temperature or water change, diseases or invasive species from ships ballast tank generating lots of headlines,  then they recover. 

On the other hand the hypochondriac tombstone probably says "I told you I was sick". 

[kerbiloid]

How many times greater amount of carbon dioxide is dissolved in the ocean than in the atmosphere?
How many times greater amount of carbon dioxide do volcanoes exhaust than puny apes do?
How did the coral reefs survive low-oxygen (high-CO₂) geological epochs?

Edited July 31, 2019 by kerbiloid

[mikegarrison]

17 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

How many times greater amount of carbon dioxide is dissolved in the ocean than in the atmosphere?
How many times greater amount of carbon dioxide do volcanoes exhaust than puny apes do?
How did the coral reefs survive low-oxygen (high-CO₂) geological epochs?

1) Doesn't matter. It's in equilibrium, so what's your point? This kind of thing is very sloppy thinking. It's like saying that the radius of the Earth is 6400 km so that means the difference between sea level and 200 km above it shouldn't matter to your ability to breathe. After all, you only shifted 3% of the radius of the Earth. 3% is very small, right?

2) First of all, again it doesn't matter. This is not an either/or situation. It's not like volcanoes will erupt less if we burn more carbon. But in fact, humans are putting out at least 60x more CO2 than volcanoes, so the implication in your question is ridiculously wrong. https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/which-emits-more-carbon-dioxide-volcanoes-or-human-activities

3) I don't know. Are you sure they did? How much do you know about the evolutionary history of coral?

[kerbiloid]

8 hours ago, mikegarrison said:

3) I don't know. Are you sure they did? How much do you know about the evolutionary history of coral?

Got interested, and just took a wikilook... Wow...
I got used to consider coral reefs as something really geological and constant, just biogenic (though, like any limestone hill).
But they appear to appear just 10 000 years old, as a result of the ocean level change.

8 hours ago, mikegarrison said:

But in fact, humans are putting out at least 60x more CO2 than volcanoes, so the implication in your question is ridiculously wrong. 

One more wow... In fact, I was erroneusly treating volcanoes as a major actor. While the biosphere is, like rotting plants and rotting eaten plants.
And the human contribution is about 3% of total CO₂ income, almost an accuracy level. Enough to disbalance the

8 hours ago, mikegarrison said:

equilibrium

, where the equilibrium is unstable, just a local historical maximum of the equilibrium.

Though still minor part globally.
And we can't stop the jungle trees from rotting in several weeks, as well as stop cows from fertilizing the ground.

So, I'm afraid the

8 hours ago, mikegarrison said:

sloppy thinking

is exactly to think that greedy humans are killing the reefs and can stop this. They of course should,, but could they?
After this wiki research things look like both we and coral reefs are just pawns, particles of dust, guignols in the natural lithospheric process.

The biosphere is just a chemically super-active volatile part of the lithosphere, its processes are just a continuation of natural geological processes.
What makes you thinking that there is an equilibrium?

Just 10k years ago (a blink of an eye on geological timescale) the equilibrium has been dramatically disturbed, the ocean level changed.
Some calcite underwater hills appeared to be close to water surface, and some water animals grew so fast that reached the ocean surface and formed visible shallow islands.

But as we can see, these newborn islands are just not geologically stable, they just volatile. They disappear several thousand years after their birth on a minor atmospheric composition change.
Humans consider them stable just because the island lifespan is many times greater than the human lifespan, so "it always was here, and always will be".
But we probably even can't be sure, how many generations of such coral reefs have been changed in the geological history of the planet, as the corals appeared about a half billion years ago, 50 000 times greater than the current reefs exist.

***

So, a maybe less sloppy version, if you please:

The biospheric component of the lithosphere appeared to be photoactive, so the chemical reactions in this part of the lithosphere (originally started due to the geological sources of heat) were running under the ddirect solar energy. The photoactivity of the lithosphere provided an additional energy source — direct usage of the fusion energy from the closest star, the Sun.

This has marked the new epoch in history of the lithosphere, the epoch of vast-and-fast chemical transformations of the thin (10 km) upper layer of the lithosphere.
By coincidence or not, It's equal to the deepest pit possible in the Earth gravity, already filled by the ocean. So, the vast-and-fast chemical transformations have occupied all terrestrial surface, both land and ocean.

As we can see, ~500 bln years ago the chemically active, biospheric, component of the lithosphere had achieved in its progress the level of complexity ("multicellulars") which allowed it to form chemically active structures by orders of magnitude more complex than ever before, and with unprecedented mobility.
(Do you know a lot of chemical moleculas that can make 100 km per day? Birds can, horses can. Humans on horses can, too. And all of them are just molecular clusters.)

The "biological" component of lithosphere (plants, animals) have covered the mostly inert inorganic surface of land, ocean water, and ocean bottom with several tens meters thick chemically active, geometrically fractal layer with enormous total surface area (due to its fractality), the plants.

Active interaction of the "plants" with atmospheric gas mixture caused massive extraction of atmospheric carbon and its conservation in underwater sedimental layer (bogs).
This temporarily lowered the concentration of such chemically active elemnet as carbon in the "fluidosphere" (atmosphere and hydrosphere), by packing it inside the chemically inert layer of the upper lithosphere, rocks.

It was just a question of time when the "conserved" carbon will return to the natural chemical cycle of the upper planet layers.
In terms of live nature this conservation lasted long, about 400 mln years (as 400 mln years ago fungi decreased the conservation rate by eating lignine faster than it can decay into coal).
In terms of lithosphere, these 400 mln years are just ~9% of the lithosphere current age, and this happened at last ~15% of its expected lifespan before the geological processes will stop, and the biological component will disappear.
In terms of complex life, we are at last 90% mark of geological lifespan of the Earth, and at last 90% mark of its complex life duration.

The conserved carbon will anyway be oxidized and return to the atmosphere just because of the core deoxidation, and the oxygen flow from beneath, but this will happen a little later, probably several hundreds millions years later.

But as we can see, several million years ago the chemically active, volatile, "biological" component of the lithosphere achieved a level-up.
The "flora" and "fauna", i,e, static and mobile molecular clusters have dramatically changed their shape, evolving into nowadays "biological species", i.e. "self-reproducing molecular superclusters".

Among them there was a fractally organized species with developed cognitive abilities - cats humans cats first of all, but here I mean humans.

This allowed this species to become the most effective and most affective rationally acting chemical agent in geological history.
This kind of molecular superclusters is able not just to transform chemical compounds, but also to use delayed information in both informational and thermodynamical sense of the term).

~12 000 years ago there happened a geological transformation, both causing a global change of landscape (ocean level, ice shield disappearing, climate changes) and forcing the leading chemical agent (humans) evolution.
The human molecular component appeared to be enough optimized and hasn't evolved a lot, but the human molecular clusters formed colonies aka "villages", then "towns", then "cities".

At the "city" level of concentration, the chemical activity of this molecular cluster ("humans") achieved so high level of complexity that has enforced the lithosphere chemical transformations like never before.

First the "human" molecular clusters started mechanically interacting with cellulose of "plants", making its fibers form regular structures ("weaving") and stick these structures around the human molecular "body" ("clothing") to keep conditions inside the "clothes" stable and keep the optimal temperature of the "human" inner chemical reactions (36.6°C).

The the "human" molecular "bodies" started interacting with the lithospheric high-temperature oxides. Aluminium oxide ("clay"), silicon oxide ("sand"). And even with lithospheric calcium carbonate ("limestone").
As the "human" hyper-molecule is able to locally raise temperature by forcing the cellulose oxidation ("fire"), this resulted into "ceramics" and "bricks", i.e. organizing of mineral compounds into stable regular shapes to limit natural expansion of gaseous and liquid chemical compounds inside or outside their volume.

5000 years ago the superb chemical agent, the mobile molecular cluster known as "humans" started chemically interacting with inert metal oxides of the lithosphere and cellulose of "plants" static molecular clusters.
As a by-product of the interaction, metals started getting reduced from lithospheric oxides and get stored in chemically pure state right in the oxidizing atmosphere, shaped into regular structures ("tools").

300 years ago the evolution of the "human" chemical  agent achieved the stage of direct oxidizing of the chemically pure carbon extracted from the lithosphere and direct reducing iron from its lithosperic oxides.
See "steel", "cast iron", "coal", "coke".

This ability allowed forced the "human" chemical agent run a new level-up in lithospheric transformation process.
By "inventing" so-called "steam engines", i.e. by including the cyclic thermodynamic processes directly into their chemical activity, by replacing chemistry with pure bruteforce physics, the efficiency of the "human" lithospheric chemical agent raised up by order of magnitude.
The activity of chemical transformation of the lithosphere by the "human" agent achieved a rather high rate. This part of the lithosphere evolution is known as "Industrial Revolution".

A little later the "human" molecular clusters, using pure thermodynamics, and interacting with all types of chemical compounds existing in the Earth conditions, achieved the phase of evolution where they can directly manage nuclear reactions and directly store and reorganize immaterial informational structures by electric machines.

The biological component of the lithosphere is being affected by all types of lithospheric processes, both "human" and "non-human".
Currently we are at the point where many obsolete and volatile biospheric components are going to disappear. Partially directly from interaction with the "human" molecular agent (say, elephants), partically as a side effect of the "human" lithosperic activity (some fishes, some birds), partially from non-human reasons (say, earthquakes and volcanoes), most of all from complex indistinguishable reasons.
The coral reefs as a highly volatile component of the "biochemical" component of the lithosphere are just one of them, sad but looks true.

The "human" agent is close to form a stable self-sufficient lithospheric structure, probably in 100 years or so, once it stops growing, starts using fusion directly rather than from Sun, finishes active interacting with inert components of the lithosphere (including oxidized metals and carbon conserved both directly and as carbonates) by replacing it with wastes recycling.

Sad, but the "biological" component of the lithosphere (including volatile objects like reefs and relic species like elephants) will probably dramatically get extinct, to be then totally replaced with biochecmical forms produced by humans, based on the "natural" species DNA code and gene engineering.

***

So, for sure, the humanity should start recycling wastes and replace fuel burning with fusion reactors as soon as possible.
(And the waste recycling gets much funnier when you have a fusion plant for power, so the fusion is the key to future).
But isn't this a consensus in this forum? And doesn't humanity do its best to start fusing asap?

And humans are not a poison, they are a lithospheric enzyme.

Edited August 1, 2019 by kerbiloid

[mikegarrison]

I'll just drop in here that my job is as an emissions engineer. This doesn't make me a climate scientist, but it does mean I work with them and have actively studied this stuff for about 20 years. I really caution against drawing conclusions based on over-simplified assumptions.

Yes, the carbon cycle is huge, and lots of carbon exchange is going on all the time. But it really is in equilibrium, so the vast amount of exchanging is not terribly relevant to whether perturbations are important. And since the timescales for CO2 to get removed out of the atmosphere are on the order of 100s to 1000s or years (depending on the process), the rate that humans are adding CO2 to the atmosphere is essentially nearly instantaneous. The long term cycles can't respond fast enough, which is why the CO2 is building up in the atmosphere and the ocean (which exchanges with the atmosphere, so they are pretty nearly one combined pool for CO2 buildup).

Anyway, this isn't just theory. We have excellent hard data on how much CO2 is in the atmosphere and it is clearly responding to human activity far faster than any of the carbon exchange mechanisms can respond to.