Vanishing kelp: Warm ocean takes toll on undersea forests
pilgrimage will not be a tranquil one. Adding to his existing baggage, at least two other entities want a piece of him. One of them is a band of fortune hunters who want the precious stone. The other is a stoic, bespectacled loner clad in a black frock coat and accompanied by a German shepherd named General.
Roof of the world
Tabei will obviously be needing some allies, and he adopts a few along the way, including a lovesick shepherdess named Chung and a mute boy, Pu, who slips on a goofy folk mask at meaningful moments.
The real main character of the movie, however, is the vast and varied landscape of Tibet. The stunning widescreen cinematography never repeats itself, moving through a stunning array of mountains, plains, plateaus, deserts, valleys, marshes, rivers and canyons.
Ultimately, though, this gorgeous film is neither picturesque travelogue nor swashbuckling adventure. It is a profound testament to the human spirit mixed, just maybe, with some moral support for an ancient culture in danger of being ground up in the bloody maw of the modern world.
APPLEDORE ISLAND, Maine — When diving in the Gulf of Maine a few years back, Jennifer Dijkstra expected to be swimming through a flowing kelp forest that had long served as a nursery and food for juvenile fish and lobster.
But Dijkstra, a University of New Hampshire marine biologist, saw only a patchy seafloor before her. The sugar kelp had declined dramatically and been replaced by invasive, shrublike seaweed that looked like a giant shag rug.
“I remember going to some dive sites and honestly being shocked at how few kelp blades we saw,” she said.
The Gulf of Maine, stretching from Cape Cod to Nova Scotia, is the latest in a growing list of global hotspots losing their kelp, including hundreds of miles in the Mediterranean Sea, off southern Japan and Australia, and parts of the California coast.
Among the world’s most diverse marine ecosystems, kelp forests are found on all continental coastlines except for Antarctica and provide critical food and shelter to myriad fish and other creatures. Kelp also is critical to coastal economies, providing billions of dollars in tourism and fishing.
The likely culprit, according to several scientific studies, is warming oceans from climate change, coupled with the arrival of invasive species. In Maine, the invaders are other seaweeds. In Australia, the Mediterranean and Japan, tropical fish are feasting on the kelp.
Most kelp are replaced by small, tightly packed, bushy seaweeds that collect sediment and prevent kelp from growing back, said the University of Western Australia’s Thomas Wernberg.
“Collectively these changes are part of a recent and increasing global trend of flattening of the world’s kelp forests,” said Wernberg, co-author of a 2016 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which found that 38 percent of kelp forest declined over the past 50 years in regions that had data.
Kelp losses on Australia’s Great Southern Reef threaten tourism and fishing industries worth $10 billion. Die-offs contributed to a 60 percent drop in species richness in the Mediterranean and were blamed for the collapse of the abalone fishery in Japan.
“You are losing habitat. You are losing food. You are losing shoreline protection,” said University of Massachusetts Boston’s Jarrett Byrnes, who leads a working group on kelp and climate change. “They provide real value to humans.”
The Pacific Coast from northern California to the Oregon border is one place that suffered dramatic kelp loss, according to Cynthia Catton, a research associate at the Bodega Marine Laboratory at the University of California, Davis. Since 2014, aerial surveys have shown that bull kelp declined by over 90 percent, something Catton blamed on a marine heat wave along with a rapid increase in kelp-eating sea urchins.
Without the kelp to eat, Northern California’s abalone fishery has been harmed.
“It’s pretty devastating to the ecosystem as a whole,” Catton said. “It’s like a redwood forest that has been completely clear-cut. If you lose the trees, you don’t have a forest.”
Kelp is incredibly resilient and has been known to bounce back from storms and heat waves.
But in Maine, it has struggled to recover following an explosion of voracious sea urchins in the 1980s that wiped out many kelp beds. Now it must survive in waters that are warming faster than the vast majority of the world’s oceans — most likely forcing kelp to migrate northward or into deeper waters.
“What the future holds is more complicated,” Byrnes said. “If the Gulf of Maine warms sufficiently, we know kelp will have a hard time holding on.”