From the New York Times
on the Web
Editorial/Op-Ed
August 4, 2001
|
From the New York Times
on the Web August 4, 2001 |
What the Seas Can Offer
By ROBERT GAGOSIAN
WOODS HOLE, Mass. - Oceans remain a vast, fluid frontier - as
multilayered, dynamic and complicated as our atmosphere, but far
less known to us. We have mapped the waterless surfaces of Mars,
Venus and the moon but only about 5 percent of our own sea floor.
Yet some of our most pressing environmental and economic decisions
- about managing global warming, finding new energy sources, predicting
climate changes, sustaining fisheries and protecting coastal property
- depend on understanding the inner workings of our oceans.
The newly created Ocean Commission, established last year by the Oceans Act of 2000, will have the opportunity to make the study of our oceans a national priority. The commission, made up of scientists and representatives of government and business, will soon begin meeting and making recommendations to the president and Congress for new policies relating to our oceans - to protect and manage fisheries and coastlines, for example.
This is an important step. It has been nearly three decades since the federal government created the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal agency that monitors and conducts research on weather and oceans. The demands on oceans and coastlines have expanded considerably since then. Our understanding of how oceans work has changed, too.
Take, for example, the oceans' relation to energy issues and global warming. We recently found clues that the natural gas methane may be percolating up from the sea floor in large quantities. This could be a potentially large new source of energy.
Methane is also a potent greenhouse gas; if it rises to the surface, steadily or in sudden bursts, it could play a significant role in global warming. But it is also possible that oceans can help mitigate global warming by absorbing large amounts of carbon dioxide, another greenhouse gas, from the atmosphere.
The oceans store 1,100 times more heat than the atmosphere. With more information, scientists will be able to figure out if global warming will interfere with the ability of oceans to absorb and release heat, destabilize their delicately balanced circulation and trigger dramatic climate changes.
We have the technology to allow us to answer some of these questions. We have sensors and autonomous underwater vehicles to measure the subtle processes that drive ocean currents and govern the oceans' exchange of heat and chemicals with the atmosphere. And we have begun to deploy long-term ocean observatories in the vast open ocean, on the sea floor and along coasts.
A global network of these observatories would allow us to study climate in a way that land-based meteorologists cannot. It would give us greater ability to predict major climate changes over long periods of time, in contrast to the immediate daily predictions available to us now.
With this information we could be more prepared, minimizing the economic losses caused by weather events, and could make better long-term decisions - about which crops to plant, for example. According to a NOAA report, the climate predictions made possible by the instruments we deployed in the Pacific in the mid-1990's will save farmers and taxpayers in the United States about $300 million a year.
Of course research and technology like this are expensive. But the Ocean Commission should use this opportunity to persuade political leaders that investment in basic science on our oceans is vital to our environmental and economic future.
Robert Gagosian is director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.