Fish, Radiation and The Doomsday Clock

The doomsday clock conveys how close humanity is to catastrophic destruction–the figurative midnight–and monitors the means humankind could use to destroy itself.

First and foremost these include nuclear weapons, but they also encompass climate-changing technologies and new developments in the life sciences that could inflict irrevocable harm. (ii)

The clock was started at seven minutes to midnight in 1947 during the Cold War and subsequently advanced or rewound, reflecting international events dangerous to humankind, nineteen times.

The most recent officially-announced setting — six minutes to midnight — was on 14 January 2010.

The timeline entry read:

2010: International cooperation rules the day. Talks between Washington and Moscow for a follow-on agreement to the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty are nearly complete, and more negotiations for further reductions in the U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenal are already planned. Additionally, Barack Obama becomes the first U.S. president to publicly call for a nuclear-weapon-free world. The dangers posed by climate change are still great, but there are pockets of progress. Most notably: At Copenhagen, the developing and industrialized countries agree to take responsibility for carbon emissions and to limit global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius. (Full Timeline)

Setting the clock is decided by the directors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reflecting global affairs. However, the clock has not always been set and reset as quickly as events occur – the closest nuclear war threat, the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, reached crisis, climax, and resolution before it could be set to reflect that possible doomsday. (iii)

What about today?  In the light of recent findings, is it time to advance the clock in anticipation of impending disaster?

Reports of ice melt due to climate change from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggest it should be.  The IPCC is the leading body for the assessment of climate change, established by the United Nations to provide the world with a clear, balanced view of the present state of understanding of climate change.

In the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report scientists conclude that:

“warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global average sea level”,

and, furthermore, they conclude with “very high confidence (at least a 9 out of 10 chance of being correct) that the globally averaged net effect of human activities since 1750 has been one of warming” of the Earth’s climate system.

 

This view is accompanied by news from University of Arizona-led research team which suggests warming of the ocean’s subsurface layers will melt underwater portions of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets faster than previously thought.(III)

Most previous research has focused on how increases in atmospheric temperatures would affect the ice sheets.  Lead author Jianjun Yin, a UA assistant professor of geosciences, says;

“Ocean warming is very important compared to atmospheric warming because water has a much larger heat capacity than air. If you put an ice cube in a warm room, it will melt in several hours. But if you put an ice cube in a cup of warm water, it will disappear in just minutes.”

Co-author Jonathan T. Overpeck adds;

“This does mean that both Greenland and Antarctica are probably going to melt faster than the scientific community previously thought.”

Other than excess water in our oceans, what consequence is the melting ice likely to have?

Reports by The Alister Hardy of Foundation for Ocean Science (SAHFOS), found that a tiny species of plankton called Neodenticula seminae that went extinct in the North Atlantic some 800,000 years ago has become an Atlantic resident again, having drifted from the Pacific through the Arctic Ocean thanks to dramatically reduced polar ice.

The discovery represents “the first evidence of a trans-Arctic migration in modern times” related to plankton, according to the UK-based Sir Alister Hardy Foundation for Ocean Science, whose researchers warn that “such a geographical shift could transform the biodiversity and functioning of the Arctic and North Atlantic marine ecosystems.”

“The migrations are an example of how changing climate conditions cause species to move or change their behaviour, leading to shifts in ecosystems that are clearly visible today,” says Carlo Heip, Director General of the NIOZ Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research.

Past fossil evidence also supports shifts in ecosystems with climate change:

“The early Eocene Epoch (50 million years ago) was about as warm as the Earth has been over the past 65 million years, since the extinction of the dinosaurs. There were crocodiles above the Arctic Circle and palm trees in Alaska” says Linda Ivany, associate professor of earth sciences. (II)

A Yale research team found that average Eocene water temperature along the subtropical U.S. Gulf Coast hovered around 27 degrees centigrade (80 degrees Fahrenheit). Modern temperatures in the study area average 75 degrees Fahrenheit. (II)

The findings are based on a chemical analysis of the growth rings of the shells of fossilized bivalve mollusks and on the organic materials trapped in the sediment packed inside the shells.  Fossils were collected from sediment layers exposed along the Tombigbee River in Alabama. The mollusks lived in a near-shore marine environment during a time when the sea level was higher and the ocean flooded much of southern Alabama.(III)

Why is this news relevant to the doomsday clock? Can the flooding and additional new species such as mollusks and plankton to southern Alabama have such negative impact?

Dr. Heip says:

“Most of the impacts are so clearly negative, and the scope of change so potentially huge that, taken together, they constitute brightly flashing warning signals.”

If drifting plankton from the melting ice gives circumstance to warrant ‘brightly flashing warning signals’ what signals should be sounded from another drifting effect accompanying the plankton via the artic, namely the migration of radioactive species such as iodine, cesium and plutonium?

How do we know there are radioactive species in the arctic and that it is being released into the environment?

To enable us to find answers, scientists have devised a measuring method called an ice core. Scientists collect ice cores by driving a hollow tube deep into the miles-thick ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland (and in glaciers elsewhere).

The long cylinders of ancient ice that they retrieve provide a detailed record of what was happening in the world over the past several ice ages. That’s because each layer of ice in a core corresponds to a single year—or sometimes even a single season—and most everything that fell in the snow that year remains behind, including wind-blown dust, ash, atmospheric gases, and radioactivity.(III)

In cores from Antarctica and Greenland, researchers have pinpointed the beginning of atomic-bomb testing in the mid-1950s. They have also identified a spike representing fallout from stepped-up atmospheric testing that took place just prior to the 1963 Test Ban Treaty, which allowed for underground tests only. In the years following 1965, Antarctic snow revealed a sharp drop in radioactive fallout.

However, the cores show a sharp rise in 1988 due to fall out from the Chernobyl nuclear accident. The Chernobyl disaster was a nuclear accident that occurred on 26 April 1986 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine.

The explosion and fire in Chernobyl’s Reactor 4 released 100 times more radioactivity than was released by the combined atom-bomb explosions at Hiroshima and Nagaski in 1945.

How did it end up in the Arctic?

Much the same way many pollutants have ended up there since the industrial revolution began.

A century ago, explorers observed an Arctic haze, but did not know what caused it. In the 1970′s, scientists examined the chemistry of the Arctic haze and determined that it has a human origin.(III)

In a process called global distillation, pollutants volatize into the air in warmer areas and condense out of the air in colder areas, so these pollutants tend to be transferred from the South to the North. Also, pollutants that might decompose into less harmful chemicals do so slower in colder regions, so they tend to accumulate in the Arctic (III).

Adding to contamination in the artic region are additional nuclear contributions from Russia who, for over three decades, dumped radioactive wastes in the shallow waters of the Arctic Seas.(iii)

It is hard to calculate the total amount of radioactive waste dumped in Arctic Seas because of certain gaps in the available information.

However these numbers have been confirmed:

• Between 1964 and 1986, some 7,000 tons of solid radioactive waste and 1,600 cubic meters of liquid waste was pitched into the Kara and Barents Seas from the base in Murmasnk which serviced the Soviet fleet of nuclear powered naval and merchant ships. Likewise, nuclear reactors from at least 18 nuclear submarines and icebreakers were dumped in the Barents sea, and an entire nuclear sub was deliberately sunk after an accident in May 1968.

• In the 1950′s, the effluence from the nuclear-weapons factory near Chelyabinsk was dumped into the River Techa. It ended up in the Arctic Ocean.

• Finally, the Russians were dumping unprossed nuclear waste into The Sea of Japan. In October 1993, the Russians confirmed that one of their ships discharged 900 tons of radioactive water from scrapped nuclear submarines. (III)

Are they being released and transported to other areas?

According to a little publized 2005 article by Cota et al,  Unexpectedly high radioactivity burdens in ice-rafted sediments from the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, they are.

Unexpectedly high activity of  radionuclides were detected in sea ice floes grounded in Resolute Bay near the center of the Northwest Passage through the Canadian Arctic Archipelago.

Ken Buesseler, senior scientist in marine chemistry at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts says this much is clear;

Studies from previous releases of nuclear material in the Irish, Kara and Barents Seas, as well as in the Pacific Ocean, show that such radioactive material does travel with ocean currents, is deposited in marine sediment, and does climb the marine food web.

Both short-lived radioactive elements, such as iodine-131, and longer-lived elements — such as cesium-137, with a half-life of 30 years — can be absorbed by phytoplankton, zooplankton, kelp, and other marine life and then be transmitted up the food chain, to fish, marine mammals, and humans.  Fish can also take in radionuclides in the water through their gills.

In the Irish Sea — where the British Nuclear Fuels plant at Sellafield in the northwestern United Kingdom released radioactive material over many decades, beginning in the 1950s — studies have found radioactive cesium and plutonium concentrating significantly in seals and porpoises that ate contaminated fish.

A study published in 2003 found that a substantial part of the world’s radioactive contamination is in the marine environment.(III)

Radioactive iodine is taken up by the thyroid in humans and marine mammals — or in the case of fish, thyroid tissue.  Cesium acts like potassium and is taken up by muscle.

At the moment The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) says it is not conducting any monitoring of the marine environment for radiation.

Anyone monitoring thyroid damage in humans?

Two years ago this headline appeared:

Thyroid Cancer Increasing, Scientists Don’t Know Why

ScienceDaily (May 5, 2009) — It’s a medical mystery that has been developing for at least a decade: thyroid cancer—not breast, prostate, lung, or colon cancer—is the fastest increasing cancer among women and men in the United States.

In fact, according to new data from the National Cancer Institute (NCI), thyroid cancer diagnoses have increased at a rate of 6.5 percent a year from 1997 to 2006. The alarming trend has largely gone unnoticed.(III)

“There is now proof the increasing rate is not just a reflection of improved detection,” said Stetler, a survivor of thyroid cancer. “But researchers say they really don’t know what is causing the increase.”

Scientists are pointing to factors such as heredity, chemical pollutants, diet, obesity, and increased radiation exposure via CT scans.

How about increased radiation via contaminated marine life?

Dont worry.  The Department of Homeland Security(DHS)’s Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) has developed a miniaturized version of a dosimeter, a portable device used for measuring exposure to ionizing radiation, that can fit into your wallet.(III)

Dubbed the Citizen’s Dosimeter, this high-tech plastic card would be as convenient and affordable as a subway card, with the capability to measure the amount of radiation on a person or in a given area.

Well, that’s a relief.

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