Green About the Gills
by Bent Lorentzen
The Greenland Institute of Natural History (Grønlands Naturinstitut) has just analyzed an unusual polar phenomenon due to global warming. The melting Greenland icecap had over a few years created a huge freshwater lake at the head of Godthåb (Good-hope) Fjord. Several days ago, the ice-dam holding back that eight square mile “lake” melted and crumbled, and billions of gallons of freshwater instantly flooded the salt-water fjord. This sudden influx of quickly sinking freshwater into a salt-water environment put the local fish life in the depths into what's called “osmotic shock.”
Without getting too much into the complexities of cellular biology, osmosis is the process by which blood-driven dissolved gases – such as oxygen – and minerals & nutrients are transported through a cell's semi-permeable wall via chemical-pressure differentials. Conversely, it's also how metabolic garbage - including dissolved CO2 - is transported out of the cell and into the blood stream, to later be processed out of the body via gills or lungs, liver and kidneys. Osmotic shock can occur when environmental circumstances, such as water salinity, suddenly disrupts that smooth biochemical exchange at that osmotic-transport level of individual cells. By itself, this sudden change in water salinity was not necessarily lethal, since the oxygen- and nutrient-rich freshwater would have mixed with the pervasive salt-water of the fjord. What killed off countless rockfish in the fjord was the behavior which this sudden drop in water salinity provoked. The fish en-mass and all too quickly rushed the surface from the depths to swim themselves out of that freshwater environment.
The rock-fish instantly died due to what's known among divers as the bends, or decompression sickness. This occurs when dissolved gases, like nitrogen, in the blood's circulatory system suddenly become lethal gas bubbles caused by swimming too quickly towards the surface from a depth. You can observe a demonstration of this whenever you open your favorite bottle of soda, and the dissolved CO2 in that drink suddenly fizzes to the surface due to the abrupt pressure difference of opening the cap.
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Comments: 50
Thanks for your great description of the process!
This is a very interesting and informative post, and it will give use some data when we run across a denier.
I do know a scientist in Denmark, who got the wholehearted (and tax support) support of Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, and though he's a good person and all that, his thinking is that we can continue pumping CO2 into the atmosphere if we'd just finance some 1000 GPS-controlled, unmanned ships in the Pacific Ocean, who all will constantly spray salt water into the atmosphere in order to deal with this issue. My god, we know so little of what such a thing would do from any climatology model. But the worst is that such thinking from academics only encourages us to continue on the current course. "Hey, honey, let's buy that Humvee anyways..."
And those coal burning electric plants that Danish industry is building now in Poland, what nonsense...
Thanks, George, for pointing that out.
(a thousand thanks... which is the colloquial way of saying, Thanks)
Geez, a lot of words just to say that
but not the Rush Limbaugh way
I shudder to think how many more opportunities there will be for such posts as the climate warms.
Thanks Larry
Black flies and mosquitoes are plaguing the folk in northern Sweden and Finland like no one's memory
I do know of the bends as my husband is a diver. I just never thought fish could be effected in the same way.
Thank you for keeping us up on things happening over there.
It's of course anthropomorphic f me, but I can't help but feel a level of compassion for the pain those fish felt as they died.