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Oxigen is ALSO, and perhaps in vast quantities produced at the bottom of the ocean, by lumps of metal that react with sea water (aka Dark Oxygen). Interestingly, there are now massive marine harvesting operations targeting that very ore.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/scientists-discove...
it wont matter how much oxygen you try to dissolve, if the temperature is too high you wont hold enough dissolved oxygen to allow aquatic life.
https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/gases-solubility-water-d_...
To me the logical point was that some of the oceanic processes that release oxygen are under-thread by man's effort to pluck up those same resources.
It's true that temperature and salinity both mean less oxygen, which means these oxygenator resources might become moot for the ocean's sake, but the ocean mining work very well could threaten a vital oxygen supply for underwater areas, potentially. I think it's fair to say only that: we have no frigging clue whatsoever.
Now look up the temperatures within the water column. I don't see any notes about pressure. Temperature is one axis ...
Your charts show several "green house gases" and with some squinting and handwaving could be used to "prove" that the seas are mopping up those gases and saving the planet.
I used to keep tropical fish and they somehow managed to survive in water temperatures way higher than the open seas. In an aquarium it is the surface water area (not volume) that generally decides how many fish can live within it. The surface area determines how much oxygen can be absorbed, Oxygenating plants help and agitating the surface increases the surface area - it does not "mix in" oxygen.
My point is: That's all bollocks.
Deep-sea mining has been studied and foreseen for at least 50 years, but it's never been economical. It is possible that current technology will allow for mining of nodules, but this still seems unlikely to me.
but this still seems unlikely to me.
It is already underway and going live soon:
Below, our current progress report:
COMPLETED: Sponsorship Agreement COMPLETED: Exploration Contract COMPLETED: SK1300 NORI Technical Resource Statement; SK-1300 NORI-D Project Initial Assessment (PEA)(Excel tables) SUBMITTED: Collector Test Environmental and Social Impact Assessment APPROVED: Pilot Nodule Collector System Test COMPLETED: Pilot Nodule Collector System Test COMPLETED: Collector Test and Monitoring June 27, 2025: Exploitation contract application submission expected
Have we ever as a species successfully changed our behavior on a scale needed to address something like climate change and underwater oxygen loss?
What would be the closest “we’ve got to change or perish” moment we’ve successfully navigated?
We did a reasonable job with ozone depletion, but that has much lower costs.
The cost of not addressing it is more distributed: at some point you can't go outside anymore since the UV index is so high, sunscreen can't block high-intensity UV-B and UV-C, plants get damaged to the point of catastrophic crop failures... you can live in denial about climate change in developed countries (for a limited time anyway) but ozone affects everyone.
Yesterday there was an article here about ozone vs aluminum from the spacex sattelites reentry (which soon there will be plenty of)
Acid rain as well.
Indeed. But still amazed we did anything about it, since it didn’t immediately affect population centers or cause economic impacts.
I just can’t see the same happening in today’s political climate…
Ozone hole over Antarctica.
It is possible for us to work together and fix these things.
Edit:
Moving away from leaded gas might be another example.
(CFCs and leaded gas invented by the same dude, fun fact: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr. Quite a legacy...)
When the costs are low and require no change in personal behaviour, nor even belief in the problem. Billions of people had no idea about changes to aerosol propellants or refrigerants and they were not required to know or agree in order to solve the problem.
It's not possible for us to work together and fix it, since most of the problem is coming from China, like with most pollution in general. Unless you're proposing something like nuking China.
We haven't fixed the ozone hole yet. It'll take another 40 years for it to return to the levels prior to 1980:
https://science.nasa.gov/earth/earth-observatory/ozone-hole-...
The only truly global intervention I can think of whose impact might be discernible over geological timescales is the ban on testing nuclear weapons.
Well, we inadvertently stopped having as much children. That should help, but our current system economic systems can’t handle falling birthrates
Ozone, leaded motor vehicle fuels, asbestos, acid rain, DDT, commercial whaling, atmospheric nuclear testing.
(Not all of these were existential to humans necessarily, but all have been largely successes.)
Nuclear weapons (so far)?
Banning CFCs perhaps?
If you want to go older and more localised you could look at forestry and fisheries laws. Sometimes we self-regulate and form a stable state, other times we over-extract until collapse
Historically speaking over over a billion years almost every species has consumed one thing and output another to the point of extinction while another species that consumes that grows and repeats the cycle.
Climate change has been the story of evolution since life appeared on earth and aglae filled the atmosphere with gasses.
I mean yes but where does that get us? The great oxygenation event wasn't exactly good for the organisms that were alive at the time.
Lead in gasoline? https://ourworldindata.org/leaded-gasoline-phase-out
We almost eradicated several diseases, usually screwed over by designating an Omelasan child (though, that's a bad characterization, because letting parts of the world continue to suffer and serve as a reservoir for those diseases was actually completely unnecessary).
DNS, IP adresses and Emoji of course, all global efforts, with extinction level risks.
Food?
I.E. avoiding population collapse due to lack of ecosystem carrying capacity? Eliminating famine? etc.
the kind of changes that were required to avoid massive famines also rely on chemical fertilizer. aaand.... "the production of chemical fertilizers, particularly synthetic nitrogen-based ones, is a highly energy-intensive process that creates significant amounts of carbon dioxide"
We stopped using CFCs to fix the hole in the ozone layer
"We"?
if by "we" you mean Chinese, then yes, as THEY have maintained a cultural structure and language far longer than we have, and adapting themselves and there environment to do that was something they have been doing successfully for millenia,China still venerates the first engineer "Gun"assigned to control the flooding on the yallu river 3300 years ago, and it is then no surprise that they are building solar, wind and other renewable fossil/carbon free energy sources at an unprecidented rate, and ultra high voltage grid systems to distribute that energy, while we wring our hands committing genocide on the Palistinians.
They've also gone through 13 major dynasties and about 2 societal collapses. That of course doesn't undo China's amazing cultural, technological, and social advances and achievements over the millenia, but it does suggest that their history is more nuanced.
I think that the banng of HFCs is a pretty good example of collective action.
Also, it's important to realize that climate change, as we best understand it right now, is not a "or perish" type of situation. RCP8.5 has now been soundly eliminated from the set of potential climate trajectories, so what we're left with is a question of 1) how much mass migration will be forced upon the world, with concomitant wars and social strife, and 2) how much economic loss results from that, as well as from lost opportunity by not adopting cheaper renewable energy routes.
Technological innovation has done something absolutely remarkable: the future with the cheapest and most abundant energy is the one that switches to renewable energy and storage the fastest. Every day we delay, not only do we end up with a worse climate outcome, but we also just light money on fire, with worse economic efficiency. And in economies built on the continual compounding interest of technological advancement, we subject humanity to far greater poverty for every day we delay the transition.
Most of the world will benefit from this technological change happening quickly. There will be some outliers, like the US, that choose to be poorer and less influential by actively subverting renewable energy in the marketplace (the Trump administration has done a huge amount of economic damage in only a small amount of time), but the US will come around. Texas is leading the way, because they are actually market driven more than they are politically driven, but the rest of the US is kind of screwed on that front for a while.
No matter how poor you think the US is, the average person in the rest of the world is indeed poorer.
As the link is university press release, here is study mentioned: https://aslopubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ln...
Oxygen loss already happens, see news about dead fish.
Issue here is that becomes more common and underwater oxygen loss is approaching an “unsafe space” with impacts likely irreversible within human lifetimes, some of which could persist for centuries.
Coastal “dead zones”, impact of fish food etc.
"Irreversible on human timescales" is a nice succinct wording; I think I usually end up discussing that concept in a less clear / more roundabout way.
A higher resolution version of the poster from the article:
https://scx2.b-cdn.net/gfx/news/2026/underwater-oxygen-loss....
a primer regarding gaseous O2 soluability in water.
https://academicpath.org/solubility-oxygen-water-temperature...
Two San Diego posts at once! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49083314
Go team!
> irreversible on human timescales
It's almost like we might need that network of oceanic data collection sites.
The one recently defunded by the Trump administration.
https://oceanographicmagazine.com/news/trump-administration-...
The feedback loop between warming and deoxygenation is particularly concerning for deep-water systems that have been stable for millennia. If we hit the thresholds mentioned where the ocean's 'internal clock' is disrupted, it might permanently alter nutrient cycling beyond what current atmospheric models predict. I'm curious if any researchers here have insight into whether localized aeration tech could mitigate this in crucial spawning grounds, or if the scale is simply too vast.
Next post would be what: Human hubris as measured by UN Hubris Measuring Commitee now threatens to collapse the entire solar system into a purple hole?
Can we please snap out of it and use something like if not common sense but at least a Fermi approach? Or did he die in vain?
“Threatens earths stability”
So do nukes. Or a series of earthquakes. Or a really bad set of solar flares. Or a world war.
This just in, death threatens life. The internet sucks.