A university teacher in Lafayette, Louisiana talks of his son serving on a nuclear submarine in the U.S. Navy cruising somewhere secretly in the ocean covering 70 percent of Earth. The professor knows from his years of study more than half of our planet’s oxygen supply comes from the critical natural process of photosynthesis by means of tiny ocean creatures called phytoplankton. The entire ocean food chain depends upon phytoplankton which are actually a “rainforest” surrounding ¾ of the only celestial body not named after a Greek or Roman god.
The Lafayette professor tells a harrowing story of life on a submarine such as the $2 billion Ohio class vessel. There are two crews of 150 members. In correspondence with his professor father, the young sailor told of tense moments when crew members become agitated or incoherent.
Submarine commanders are the second most powerful individuals in the world following nine leaders of nations with nuclear weapons. Commanders detect erratic interactions and know instinctively oxygen is running low on submarines when crew members behave in an unacceptable or dangerous manner. The commander knows it is time to order an influx of more oxygen for the crew members or suffer severe consequences.
Each vessel has a device to ingest the limitless supply of water, split away two parts of hydrogen and offer precious oxygen to crew members who simply cannot survive without it.
Seven billion conscious beings on Earth are simply unaware of the “Great Plankton Die-off” that has been occurring silently since limitless burning of fossil fuels in our Industrial Revolution.
Svante August Arrhenius (1959-1927) was one of the founders of physical chemistry who warned humankind of coming dangers over one hundred years ago.
350 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide is considered a tolerable level for survival on Earth. For the first time in 800,000 years, the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii detected 400ppm in 2018. Global warming is a scientific fact upon which 95% of climate researchers agree.
“Global Warming Zaps Oxygen by Robert Hunziker (Counterpunch) introduces “A team of scientists with GO2NE (Global Ocean Oxygen Network) created by the UN Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission conducted a sweeping all-encompassing study of the state of ocean oxygen: “In the past 50 years, the amount of water in the open ocean with zero oxygen has gone up more than fourfold. In coastal water bodies, including estuaries and seas, low-oxygen sites have increased more than 10-fold since 1950. Scientists expect oxygen to continue dropping even outside these zones as Earth warms.”
The Gulf of Mexico “dead zone” is now the size of New Jersey.
The US Defense Department is constantly on guard for submarines on the Atlantic coast or in the Gulf of Mexico. Oil magnates know there are 27,000 orphaned (and leaking wells?) in the Gulf around the time of Louisiana’s Deepwater Horizon tragedy (April 2010). Who measures our loss of oxygen now? We need a submarine commander to supply oxygen that is slowly vanishing from our lungs. Disorientation follows oxygen loss.
