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#water#oxygen#https#more#ozone#change#climate#energy#com#news

Discussion (86 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

flockonus•about 12 hours ago
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...

rolph•about 12 hours ago
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_...

gerdesj•about 11 hours ago
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.

rolph•about 10 hours ago
solubility of gases in water is a general phenomenon, yes water is solvent for a lot of things, and that exacerbates the situation, more gases, mean partial solubility rather than the whole solubility, so that would mean even less oxygen dissolved in a volume of water.

you need to update your model of physical chemistry, there are a number of issues to your detriment.

as temperature increases, gas solubility decreases across the board, solvent caging of water is inhibited at higher temperatures.

the issue is not only oxygen. water must be solvent to ammonia, and CO2 to an extent compatible with physiology.

it wont matter how much O2 is dissolved if you cant excrete your waste products.

CO2 dissolved in water at quantity will convert partially to carbonic acid, lowering the pH of the water, and dissolving Ca++ Carbonate this means its harder to make a shell, and what shell you have is dissolving at an increased rate.

smallerize•about 11 hours ago
The note on pressure is near the top of the page. "at one atmosphere (101.325 kPa) ". How would we even move the pressure axis for the ocean? I have no idea what you're complaining about.
jauntywundrkind•about 4 hours ago
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.

nickff•about 12 hours ago
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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_sea_mining#History

frm88•about 8 hours ago
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

https://metals.co/nori/

toddmorey•about 13 hours ago
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?

hinoki•about 13 hours ago
We did a reasonable job with ozone depletion, but that has much lower costs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_depletion

littlexsparkee•about 13 hours ago
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.
runtime_terror•about 12 hours ago
True but at the time the ozone hole was mostly over the Antarctic so the average person didn't feel its effects which wouldn't then contribute to the change in policy.
parineum•about 10 hours ago
I find the reverse of this argument significantly more compelling.
piskov•about 13 hours ago
Yesterday there was an article here about ozone vs aluminum from the spacex sattelites reentry (which soon there will be plenty of)
WalterGR•about 13 hours ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49062120

“Plasma Tunnels Reveal How Dying Satellites Fall to Earth” (ieee.org)

conception•about 12 hours ago
Acid rain as well.
BobbyTables2•about 9 hours ago
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…

t0mpr1c3•about 11 hours ago
The only truly global intervention I can think of whose impact might be discernible over geological timescales is the ban on testing nuclear weapons.
rablackburn•about 13 hours ago
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

dredmorbius•about 8 hours ago
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.)

gneuron•about 12 hours ago
m4rtink•about 10 hours ago
DNS, IP adresses and Emoji of course, all global efforts, with extinction level risks.
chasing•about 13 hours ago
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...)

appreciatorBus•about 13 hours ago
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.
nemomarx•about 12 hours ago
Do people have to know about what generates their electricity? They get input now, but we could probably just stop taking public input on new infrastructure and that would avoid poorly motivated protests of wind farms or nuclear.
rgbrenner•about 13 hours ago
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-...

tombot•about 5 hours ago
We stopped using CFCs to fix the hole in the ozone layer
chaostheory•about 11 hours ago
Well, we inadvertently stopped having as much children. That should help, but our current system economic systems can’t handle falling birthrates
r3trohack3r•about 13 hours ago
Food?

I.E. avoiding population collapse due to lack of ecosystem carrying capacity? Eliminating famine? etc.

yablak•about 12 hours ago
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"
tsunamifury•about 12 hours ago
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.

soVeryTired•about 9 hours ago
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.
underlipton•about 12 hours ago
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).
epistasis•about 12 hours ago
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.

glitchc•about 12 hours ago
No matter how poor you think the US is, the average person in the rest of the world is indeed poorer.
epistasis•about 12 hours ago
I'm not understanding how this observation relates to my comment, in any way.

Renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels. The areas that are just developing widespread electricity now will do it far cleaner than the US did, skipping the lower development stages of electricity and jumping directly into the future, if that's what you're saying. But I'm having trouble understanding what you mean.

harimau777•about 11 hours ago
The average person in the rest of the world lives in a dramatically different social structure than Western late stage capitalism. In effect the social contract of capitalism was "give up the culture, social institutions, etc. that make for a stable collectivist society and in exchange enjoy the benefits of consumerism." I don't think it is surprising that people are angry when the Capital class decides that they don't get the consumerism either.
anonymousiam•about 12 hours ago
True, but most people don't think about why that is the case. They'll blame slavery (abolished over 160 years ago), or the "exploitation" by capitalists (that produce wealth for all). Some may claim that the US has more natural resources, but The US is rich because of the freedoms and rights that our citizens have. Look at the poverty of the Soviet Union or Mao's China, or in Cuba today.

I cannot for the life of me understand the increasing popularity of socialism and communism in the US today. Those forms of government have a proven track record of failure.

metalman•about 12 hours ago
"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.
harimau777•about 10 hours ago
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.
sixtyj•about 13 hours ago
As the link is university press release, here is study mentioned: https://aslopubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ln...
sixtyj•about 13 hours ago
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.

hrldcpr•about 13 hours ago
"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.
andai•about 10 hours ago
A higher resolution version of the poster from the article:

https://scx2.b-cdn.net/gfx/news/2026/underwater-oxygen-loss....

rolph•about 9 hours ago
a primer regarding gaseous O2 soluability in water.

https://academicpath.org/solubility-oxygen-water-temperature...

t0mpr1c3•about 8 hours ago
> 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-...

contingencies•about 12 hours ago
Two San Diego posts at once! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49083314

Go team!

fenestella•about 13 hours ago
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.
lstodd•about 13 hours ago
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?

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irishcoffee•about 10 hours ago
“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.