Transitioning currents in times of climate change – Part One

The incredibly beautiful and, at times, frightening ocean is likely to be the largest moving phenomena most of us will ever witness.

Ocean waters tumble and cascade down ridges, creep abyssal plains, pinch off in crisp eddy rings that coalesce at the surface, rise in steep shoals and upwellings, crash and fold in on themselves and evaporate to the clouds. Ocean currents[1] are not stable or inﬁnite – they have histories and may be shaken, diverted, and propelled at different speeds and in different directions by planetary wobbles, winds, celestial forces and Earth’s orbit. Through their global journeys and local upwellings, salty, wet, transitional currents animate the ocean’s complex liveliness. Enormous circulatory systems glide, wind and pump their way around the earth, crossing abyssal plains, massaging continents, breaking off into meandering currents and eddies that distribute warmth and nutrients before cycling back to be replenished.

Imagining the world through currents takes us offshore, away from terrestrial biases to consider our relations with ocean life and dynamics. Driven by transitional material exchanges, the surface currents, overturning circulation and biological pumps inﬂuence planetary climate systems and biological communities through myriad relations. They are thoroughly implicated and entangled with terrestrial events and intensifying human activities: ﬂuxes of carbon, plastics and other materials arriving, transforming and leaving through river mouths, canal outlets, vehicle exhausts, rain freshened surfaces, holiday coastlines, beneath ice sheets and evaporating skyward. Currents send ashore the material missives of the local conditions through which they pass: washed up wrack, froth and spume from offshore sediment and kelp forests; as they also send warmth, seeds, remnant oil and plastic from one basin edge to another. As Neimanis observes of watery bodies (Neimanis 2014), the distributive capacity of currents is both situated and global. Currents stream material transitions, showing us where change comes from and where the effects of change are going.

Despite destructive tsunamis and powerful waves, the ocean is a generous provider of life conditions for humans and other animals. However, human exploitations of marine environments swirl as an undertow, challenging the very concept of human companionability with the seas. In an unequal exchange, the ocean’s biological communities, environments and dynamic systems are imperilled by overfishing (Pauly, 2010; Probyn, 2016); loss of marine biodiversity (Worm et al., 2006; Mitchell, 2009); sand depletions (UNEP, 2014); pollution from offshore petroleum extraction (Passow, 2015); threats of deep seabed mining (Hunter and Taylor, 2013; Rosenbaum and Grey, 2015); and global material ﬂows of plastics that now speckle planetary currents (Cressey, 2016). Intensifying streams of our carbon emissions intersect with these issues and bring transition of an entirely different register. Planetary scaled ocean warming is deepening (De Lavergne et al., 2014; Hill, 2013), and this is signiﬁcant for the ﬂow and reach of ocean dynamics and the creatures and other systems reliant on them (Van Gennip et al., 2017; Brierley and Kingsford, 2009; Eissa and Zaki, 2011). Major overturning circulations are showing signs of slowing (See also Menezes, Macdonald, and Schatzman 2017 and Nace 2020). We humans are in a soak with the ocean – dependent on the very systems and materials that our actions imperil; and thoroughly implicated in, and affected by, their transitions.

Governance regimes fail to remove these ongoing threats. Particular systems amplify the ocean’s vulnerable state, such as the deep seabed mining regime inaugurated by United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and the International Seabed Authority. Seabed mining is an industry that may destroy some of the least understood ecosystems on the planet (Earle, 2016; International Seabed Authority, 2011). Under the extractivist regimes in which we are all differently implicated, conservation measures and principles may mitigate against the environmental harms of these activities. However, they have not yet prevented ocean transitions that augur less comfortable futures for differently vulnerable human and other animal communities.

The ocean that informed the long drafting of UNCLOS is not the same ocean today, yet their legal representations remain. UNCLOS’s foundational values instrumentalise a world for our use; one that is represented as exterior to, and situated outside the world of relations, rather than a world imagined from within its makings. The spatialised and territorialised realm that is the law’s ocean is structured as a background place where things happen – ﬁsh are harvested, sediments are mined, cables are laid, bombs are tested, chemicals are dumped, plastics circulate, waters warm and acidify (see also Steinberg, 2001). In this imaginary the ocean is instrumentalised as quarry, pantry, sink and sump.

To ‘sea truth’ and to live better with the ocean, we might understand more closely the material agency and transitional nature of the ocean’s dynamic systems and relations. Doing so offers a conceptual ground for understanding the nature of transition itself, so that ﬁnding ways to live better with the ocean might challenge us to live better with their transitions. Beyond their narrow taxonomic categories, or as subjects of siloed scientiﬁc research, how do ocean currents and other moving bodies shape the livable worlds that humans and other animals experience, albeit differently, across different localities. What might ecologically oriented imaginaries tell us of how our material appetites and carbon ﬂows impact the ocean? How might we create imaginaries for more companionable ways to live well with the transitioning ocean in times of climate change?

Transitioning currents and carbon streams

Surface currents and winds work together to up-end our terrestrial assurances of place. Currents are described by the direction in which they move, whereas the winds that drive or buffer them are described according to the direction from which they come. Powerful westerly trade winds chase the easterly ﬂowing Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC). Meanwhile, the East Australian Current (EAC) hugs the continent’s east while travelling the western boundary of the South Paciﬁc Basin. The Leeuwin Current tracks along the west coast, travelling the eastern boundary of the Indian Ocean. Brushing, swirling, licking and sweeping the continents and islands, and their submarine shelf slopes, currents animate and transform the solid edges against which we orient ourselves: seaward of the eastern coast of Australia, for example, a concert of uniquely constituted rotating water masses, chains of eddy lenses and coalescences of cast-off rings stir and unsettle the western edge of the Paciﬁc Basin.

Currents are not undifferentiated ‒ in an ecological sense, each has their own histories, watery routes, marine passengers, physical characteristics and ways of responding and transitioning with the material conditions they meet. Nor are current ﬂows assured or immutable, as Scher et al. (2015) have found in relation to the ancient westerly ﬂowing origins of the ACC. Stefan Helmreich (2014), too, explores the physical variations of waves but with a focus more on their cultural signiﬁcance. Currents have their own way of going about the ocean, meandering snug against rocky outcrops stubbled with crimson anemones, refreshing frilly green algae, or streaming through sediment plumes that rise from seabed excavations.

Currents act and can be acted upon with an inherently relational and ethical agency; subtly transforming the waters through which they pass, and in turn transformed by the waters that they meet, the particles collected, and the continents and seaﬂoors they sweep. Human actions too materially transition with ocean currents, in the sense that Barad refers to as ‘intra-acting from within and as part of the world in its becoming’ (Barad, 2007, 396). Sticky, salt watery currents manifest ocean relationality, and carry our weathering agency, and streams of carbon and plastics, into thick time. Thinking with Haraway’s concept of ‘natureculture’ Neimanis argues that ‘[w]ater is eminently natureculture’ (Neimanis, 2014, 15). If this is the case, then so too is water’s myriad expressions as ocean currents. Temporalities and materialities of natureculture entangle currents: emissions and engine ignitions, wireless laptops, residential dwelling, bridges, chemicals and minerals, atmosphere and ocean skin, heat and volition – all co-producing the signal changes now coming into visibility. Transitioning relations of ocean currents carry plastics from river mouths and gather them in the grind of the North Paciﬁc’s Great Paciﬁc Garbage Patch, or as micro-plastics ingested by plankton. These transitions catch up with us in the Southern Ocean, where around 60 per cent of anthropogenic heat and almost half our carbon dioxide emissions are absorbed (De Lavergne et al., 2014). Carbon emissions and heat penetrate deepening levels of warming surface waters. The consequence of these transitions now measurably inﬂuence the distribution of temperature into ancient bottom waters and overturning – natureculture transitions carried in the long-term memory of ocean circulations. As watery bodies, currents convey what Neimanis describes as the ‘watery archives’ (2013, 32) of human consumption.

Emerging evidence of the thermohaline circulation’s transition through natureculture material entanglements offers a clarion call for more ethical approaches to ocean relations. The long-range temporal scale of the ocean’s overturning systems speak little of their vulnerability to changing material intensities. Their planetary scale belies the exquisite exchange and transitioning of materials at the heart of their movement. One stage of this transition occurs when ice forms around the polar region and, in the process, spits salt back into the sea. This dense, cold, saline water sinks and, then the water above moves in to replace the sinking water and eventually a current is created. The cold deep water of the thermohaline moves horizontally across the abyssal seabed until they[2] can rise again to the surface, usually around the equatorial regions. In the thick time of the thermohaline overturning, their watery archives move at the rate of a few centimetres per second. Some ancient water can take up to 1,000 years to complete the cycle, and as many years to see the sun (Mann and Lazier, 1996).

Equally planetary in scale, carbon and other greenhouse gases thicken the atmosphere and the ensuing warmer ocean sets in train a different type of transition. As carbon-plump surface waters melt polar ice, an excess of fresh water is poured into the thermohaline mix. These diluted polar waters enfeeble the thermohaline exchange to the extent that there may be real potential for a thermohaline circulation collapse (See also Keller et al., 2000, 19, Dalton 2023 and Morrison et al. 2023) Ecological knock-on effects of climate change are also transitioning the East Australian Current (EAC) and profoundly changing ocean relations. Unsuited to the warming waters, marine creatures such as yellow-tailed kingﬁsh and coral trout retreat further south (Milman, 2015). Spiny sea urchins have arrived in Tasmania and are devouring underwater forests of the 30-metre-tall giant kelp, Macrosystis pyrifera (van Sebille et al., 2014). Tasmania’s cool waters creatures are caught unprepared by the arrival of new warm water predators (Kelly, 2011). As van Sebille et al. (2014) note, these creatures can only move so far before they meet the edges of the continental shelf – this is the end of the line as their next habitable shelf is about 3,000km south at Antarctica.

Continued in: Transitioning currents in times of climate change – Part Two

Adapted from: Reid, S. (2018). “Transitioning Currents in Times of Climate Change.” In Living with the Sea, 114–28. London: Routledge.

References

Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglements of Matter and Meaning. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Brierley, A. S. and Kingsford, M. J. (2009). Impacts of climate change on marine organisms and ecosystems. Current Biology, 19(14), 602–614.

Cressey, D. (2016). The plastic ocean. Nature, 536(7616), 263–265.

Dalton, A. (2023). “A Critical Ocean Current Has Scientists Talking about The Day After Tomorrow.” The Sydney Morning Herald. March 29, 2023.

De Lavergne, C., Palter, J. B., Galbraith, E. D., Bernardello, R. and Marinov, I. (2014). Cessation of deep convection in the open Southern Ocean under anthropogenic climate change. Nature Climate Change, 4(4), 278–282.

Earle, S. (2016). Deep sea mining: An invisible land grab – Mission blue. Mission Blue. [Online] https://www.mission-blue.org/2016/07/deep-sea-mining-an-invisible-land-grab/ (Accessed 5 December 2016).

Eissa, A. E. and Zaki, M. M. (2011). The impact of global climatic changes on the aquatic environment. Procedia Environmental Sciences, 4, 251–259.

Haraway, D. (2003). The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People and Signiﬁcant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.

Helmreich, S. (2014). Waves: An anthropology of scientiﬁc things (The 2014 Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture). HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 4(3), 265–284.

Hill, S. (2013). A view to a krill: Warming seas may leave predators hungry. [Online] http:// theconversation.com/a-view-to-a-krill-warming-seas-may-leave-predators-hungry-17383 (Accessed 7 August 2015).

Hunter, T. and Taylor, M. (2013). Deep Sea Bed Mining in the South Paciﬁc (Background Paper). Centre for International Minerals and Energy Law: Brisbane: University of Queensland.

International Seabed Authority. (2011). Environmental management of deep-sea chemosynthetic ecosystems: Justiﬁcation of and considerations for a spatially-based approach. ((ISA Technical Study Series No. 9). Kingston, Jamaica: International Seabed Authority.

Keller, K., Tan, K., Morel, F. M. M. and Bradford, D. F. (2000). Preserving the ocean circulation: Implications for climate policy. Climatic Change, 47(1–2), 17–43.

Kelly, K. (2011). The Inertia Trap. Canberra: Ronin Films.

Mann, K. H. and Lazier, J. R. N. (1996). Dynamics of Marine Ecosystems: Biological- Physical Interactions in the Oceans ((Second edition)). Oxford: Blackwell.

Menezes, V., Macdonald, A. M., and Courtney Schatzman, C. (2017). “Accelerated Freshening of Antarctic Bottom Water over the Last Decade in the Southern Indian Ocean.” Science Advances 3 (1): e1601426.

Milman, O. (2015). Australian ﬁsh moving south as climate changes, say researchers. The Guardian. [Online] http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jan/29/australian- ﬁsh-moving-south-as-climate-changes-say-researchers (Accessed 23 February 2016).

Mitchell, A. (2009). Seasick: The Hidden Ecological Crisis of the Global Ocean. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Morrison, A., Hogg, A., England, M, Li, Qian., Rintoul, S. 2023. “Torrents of Antarctic Meltwater Are Slowing the Currents That Drive Our Vital Ocean ‘overturning’ – and Threaten Its Collapse.” The Conversation. March 29, 2023. http://theconversation.com/torrents-of-antarctic-meltwater-are-slowing-the-currents-that-drive-our-vital-ocean-overturning-and-threaten-its-collapse-202108.

Nace, T. 2020. “Global Ocean Circulation Keeps Slowing Down: Here’s What It Means.” Forbes. 2020.

Neimanis, A. (2013). Feminist subjectivity, watered. Feminist Review, 103, 23–41.

Neimanis, A. (2014). Alongside the right to water, a posthumanist feminist imaginary. Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, 5(1), 5–24.

Passow, U. (2015). What happened to the oil from the deepwater horizon spill? ‘Marine snow’ provides a clue. The Conversation. [Online] http://www.iﬂscience.com/environ ment/what-happened-oil-deepwater-horizon-spill-marine-snow-provides-clue/(Accessed 10 June 2015).

Pauly, D. (2010). 5 Easy Pieces: The Impact of Fisheries on Marine Ecosystems. Washing- ton: Island Press.

Probyn, E. (2016). Eating the Ocean. United Kingdom: Duke University Press.

Rosenbaum, H. and Grey, F. (2015). Deep Sea Mining: Out of Our Depth: A Critique of

Scher, H. D., Whittaker, J. M., Williams, S. E., Latimer, J. C., Kordesch, W. E. C. and Delaney, M. L. (2015). Onset of Antarctic Circumpolar Current 30 million years ago as Tasmanian Gateway aligned with westerlies. Nature, 523(7562), 580–583.

Steinberg, P. (2001). The Social Construction of the Ocean. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

UNEP. (2014). Sand: Rarer than one thinks (UNEP Global Environmental Alert Service). United Nations Environment Programme. [Online] http://na.unep.net/geas/archive/pdfs/ GEAS_Mar2014_Sand_Mining.pdf (Accessed 5 August 2017).

Van Gennip, S. J., Popova, E. E., Yool, A., Pecl, G. T., Hobday, A. J. and Sorte, C. J. B. (2017). Going with the ﬂow: The role of ocean circulation in global marine ecosystems under a changing climate. Global Change Biology, 23(7), 2602–2617.

Van Sebille, E., Oliver, E. and Brown, J. (2014). Can you surf the East Australian Current, Finding Nemo-style? [Online] http://theconversation.com/can-you-surf-the-east-austra lian-current-ﬁnding-nemo-style-27392 (Accessed 22 December 2015).

Worm, B., Barbier, E. B., Beaumont, N., Duffy, J. E., Folke, C., Halpern, B. S., Jackson J.B.C., et al. (2006). Impacts of biodiversity loss on ocean ecosystem services. Science, 314(5800), 787–790.

Footnotes

[1] Broadly conceived here to encompass phenomena such as jet streams, gyres, eddies, cast-off rings, overturnings, upwellings and myriad biological pumps.

[2] This work intentionally uses the pronouns ‘they/their/them’ in recognition of ocean and current bodies not objects but as gender-neutral, collective planetary entities.

Video: AnthropoScene II : Tideline

Credit: Adam Sébire / Climate Visuals