03-10 Ocean Currents

A professor at Teachers’ College in 1963 told us our job was to help young people understand what they don’t know. What he said impacted my life as much as my students.
You just never appreciate the complexity of issues until you try to master the basics. This has applied to everything I have had to deal with as an engineer, a teacher and a small business advocate.
And as I try to become knowledgeable about climate change, I am discovering ocean currents and their impact on weather is super complex. The map gives a very general look at the world’s ocean currents. Currents acting as conveyer belts moving heat north and cold south. And there are thousands of smaller currents all linked to the big currents.
Ocean currents are important because they impact navigation, fishing, shipping and our weather, big time.
Most of us have heard of the Gulf Stream which brings warmer water from the tropics north to warm the British Isles, Iceland and parts of continental Europe.
Scientists worry that this movement of warm water is slowing down. And in our past, and I am talking say 35,000 years ago, the slowdown of the ocean currents took us into the ice age.
I experienced a real-life ocean current issue during a trip to Greenland. It was about schools of mackerel moving into their warmer waters. Mackerel is now a Greenland export. And if you want to know where the fish are look for the feasting birds.
The movement of fish related to ocean temperatures and ocean currents is a big deal because something like 3 billion people rely on fish as their major source of protein. Everyone worries that changes in ocean currents will reduce the supply of fish.
And I have witnessed an ocean current horror story in Fiji seeing miles of plastic garbage on a beach. It is called the Pacific garbage patch where the ocean currents gather plastic poo. And it’s killing whales.
How interesting to study the lives of indigenous people in the Arctic who have a quota on whales that they can catch.
The first problem is that the migratory patterns of the whales are changing as the fish they eat follow new ocean currents. And the second problem is the ice caves they dig into the permafrost to store whale meat are not viable because the permafrost is melting.
In terms of warming, Greenland is currently shedding something like 300 billion tons of fresh water each year into the ocean. And the same thing is happening in the Antarctic. This is the big story.
We know that ocean currents are already being impacted by climate change. But the big threat to our future is when the amount of this new surface fresh water mixing with warmer and heavier sea water impacts ocean currents?
We have more than rising sea levels to worry about.