CLAM ANALYSIS SHOWS NORTH ATLANTIC SUBPOLAR GYRE ACTING STRANGELY

LIVE SCIENCE : MASSIVE SYSTEM OF ROTATING OCEAN CURRENTS ACTING STRANGELY

Excerpt: An analysis of clam shells suggests the North Atlantic subpolar gyre has had two periods of destabilization over the past 150 years: one around 1920 and the other from 1950 through present. ....

"It's highly worrying," study lead author Beatriz Arellano Nava, a postdoctoral research fellow in physical geography at the University of Exeter in the U.K., told Live Science. "The subpolar gyre was recently acknowledged as a tipping element. We still need to understand more of the impacts of a subpolar gyre abrupt weakening. But what we know so far with the few studies that have been published is that it would bring more extreme weather events, particularly in Europe ... and also changes in global precipitation patterns."

.... But the other signal was a total surprise, she said. The clam data revealed that the subpolar gyre was unstable for a few years in the run-up to the 1920s North Atlantic regime shift. This previously described event was characterized by the strengthening of currents in the gyre. Instability in the subpolar gyre likely caused the 1920s regime shift, and the timeline suggests the period of instability may have reflected the subpolar gyre's recovery from its Little Ice Age collapse, Arellano Nava said.


Go to the article for more upsetting details and a globe showing the way currents work!

LEAVE TIDE POOLS ALONE and TAKE THAT TRASH WITH YOU

Visiting a tide pool recently, I was so upset to see a mother directing her two children to pick sea creatures from between the rocks and put them in plastic buckets.  Even if they have some sort of home aquarium set up, these people were ignorant that a TIDE POOL NEEDS TO BE LEFT ALONE.  It is an ECOSYSTEM and by removing any creature, they are upsetting that ecosystem.

PLEASE TAKE PHOTOS ONLY when you go to a tide pool!

SOUND OF THE SEA by CYNTHIA BARNETT

SOUND OF THE SEA is such an interesting book, if there is only one you're going to take to the beach to read, this one should be it. Mollusks are the 'liver of our rivers" cleaning the water they are in, but plastics and pesticides are found in them.  They have ingested plastic micro particles and plastic fibers are also chocking other forms of sea life.

 

We think of clams as common but they are almost extinct in some places in this earth's waters.

The oceans are also absorbing more heat.  Where the water is too warm for them, mollusks are dying out.  Carbon Dioxide in the sea water has made sea water 30% more acidic than it was at the start of the industrial era.  Ocean acidification makes it difficult for the creatures who depend upon the shells they make to protect their bodies to create thick enough shells.  Thin and pitted shells make them more vulnerable.

SO THE NUMBER ONE THING YOU CAN DO AS A CITIZEN IS TO PICK UP AFTER YOURSELF, PUT PLASTICS IN RECYLCLING BINS, DON'T LEAVE ANYTHING IN THE SAND BECAUSE IT WILL PROBABLY END UP IN THE OCEAN/

THE SECOND MOST IMPORTANT THING YOU CAN DO AS A CITIZEN IS TO NOT BUY SEA SHELLS - NOT FOR DISPLAY, NOT AS NECKLACES, NOT DECORATING THINGS.

IS IT ETHICAL TO COLLECT SEA SHELLS? IMPACT TRAVEL ALLIANCE HAS AN OPINION

IMPACT TRAVEL ALLIANCE on ETHICAL SEA SHELL COLLECTING 

EXCERPT:  The idea of killing an animal just to display some of its body parts (much like trophy hunting) may sound disgusting, but many folks are willing to do just that to have a shell, a sand dollar, or a starfish on their shelf  It's not just immoral, it is illegal in Sanibel and Lee Couty (according to the laws about recreational sea shell harvesting in Florida) to "harvest or possess any shells that contain a live organism except for oysters, hard clams (quahogs), sunray venus clams and coquinas."

CLAMS - BIVALVE

Bivalve means two part shells.