• Homefry@infosec.pubEnglish
    0·
    2 days ago

    The Blue Whale is so large, that if you laid one out on a standard NBA basketball court, the game would be postponed.

  • MisanthropiCynic@lemm.eeEnglish
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    2 days ago

    Whales suffocate to death; they don’t drown.

    Human breathing is controlled by the autonomic nervous system. We have to hold our breath on purpose to stop ourselves from automatically breathing. This makes us passive breathers. Whales, however, are active breathers. They must choose to inhale which is why they can sleep without sucking in air. When they get too old, sick, or weak to surface, they suffocate.

    Bonus fact: whales can’t breathe through their mouths; it goes straight to the stomach. The blowhole is the only respiratory tract.

    Bonus bonus: a blue whale’s throat is so small it could choke to death on a grapefruit.

    • 5too@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      2 days ago

      Bonus bonus: a blue whale’s throat is so small it could choke to death on a grapefruit.

      I’m sure their throat can be blocked that way; but if they can’t breathe through their mouth anyway, is it actually choking? Or just terminally blocked?

      • MisanthropiCynic@lemm.eeEnglish
        0·
        2 days ago

        Fair point. I didn’t even consider the ramifications of wording it like that instead of just saying it has a small throat. I tend to use analogies a lot

  • ArtemisimetrA@lemm.eeEnglish
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    3 days ago

    Earth’s atmosphere is an ocean of gas. The ocean is an atmosphere of liquid. Words are made up.

  • whoisearth@lemmy.caEnglish
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    3 days ago

    We are killing the ocean by increasingly acidifying it. This has been known by scientists for decades.

    • andros_rex@lemmy.worldEnglish
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      2 days ago

      Ocean acidification occurs because the ocean serves as a carbon sink. Excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere forms weak carbonic acid in ocean water. The ocean has historically been slightly basic, and as it inches towards a neutral pH, it makes it impossible for things like oysters to form their shells.

      One big problem is that it’s one of the biggest carbon sinks. It’s keeping that greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere. However - as you might notice if you leave a can of Coke out on a hot day - the solubility of gases in liquids decreases when it’s hotter. The world heats up because of greenhouse gasses, less greenhouse gasses can be stored in the ocean and re-enter the atmosphere, which heats the world up more…

      Then we also have the lovely “ice albedo” positive feedback loop - dark ocean water absorbs more of the suns radiation, sea ice reflects more of it. Sea ice melts as earth heats up, exposing dark ocean which absorbs more heat and melts more ice….

      • chiliedogg@lemmy.worldEnglish
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        2 days ago

        Well at least there’s not a fuckton of methane hydrates on the ocean floor that are now releasing a greenhouse gas 30 times more potent than CO2 refrom the ocean floor as the water gets warmer. And that isn’t a self-feeding loop that means it’s probably too late to save ourselves now.

        Because that would be bad.

        • andros_rex@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          2 days ago

          Pretty much. We set off several positive feedback loops and punctured the equilibrium, and nature’s going to have to find a new one. Whether or not that can support life as we know it know is up in the air.

          (I didn’t even mention phytoplankton die offs - a lot of the oxygen produced on earth is from photosynthesis happening in the ocean - not from terrestrial plants. So you also have less of a carbon sink in that process as well.)

          When I was a child, long road trips would leave the front grill of our car caked with bugs. When I’d hunt for dandelions with my siblings, leaning close to the ground revealed a world just teeming with activity.

          Now - where are the bugs? Especially with how difficult it is to identify insect species, we’ve probably lost hundreds of thousands of bugs that were never named or studied. How critical were those bugs to their ecosystems?

          It’s difficult to motivate people to care about species of phytoplankton or ants though. Even the “save the bees” thing got twisted into a celebration of non-indigenous species that were brought in for agricultural purposes (wasps are critical for pollination, but not as cute as honey bees I guess.) The more you study ecology, the more you realize how complicated and interlocking it is, the more you realize that most human beings cannot be brought to care without substantial changes to our education system.

    • Lyrl@lemm.eeEnglish
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      2 days ago

      Well, changing it dramatically. It’s going to stay within historical ranges where ocean life flourished, but without any exoskeleton-heavy animals like corals in the mix.

  • tino@lemmy.worldEnglish
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    3 days ago

    Norwegian fjords are freaking deep. When you’re on the shore of Sognefjord, you’re standing in front of a 1300m deep canyon filled with ocean water.

    • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyzEnglish
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      2 days ago

      What I like to think about is that fjords were carved out by glaciers and the sea level has certainly been lower that it was now in the past… but 1300m deep what???

      …so how did Glaciers cut rock BELOW sea level? Like wayyyyyy below sea level?

      It is the weight of the entire glacier bearing down and carving wayyyyyy below a depth that a chunk of ice would make sense being at, the entire glacier basically serves as a trench digging machine and as you pointed out these fjords are REALLY deep.

  • markovs_gun@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    4 days ago

    When a whale dies and its corpse falls to the bottom of the ocean, entire ecosystems rapidly develop around eating every part of it due to how scarce resources are in the deep ocean. This phenomenon is called a “whale fall” and it’s a major source of energy for deep ocean ecosystems.