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Heading South: the Faces of Our Changing Oceans by Jessica Cockerill 2017

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Heading South: the Faces of Our Changing Oceans by Jessica Cockerill 2017 Heading South: The Faces of our Changing Oceans by Jessica Cockerill 2017 Thank you to the Tasmanian Writers Centre and the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies for providing me with the opportunity to write this piece. I am also very grateful to Gretta Pecl, Scott Ling, Curtis Champion, Emma Lee and Mick Barron for sharing their stories with me; Kelly and Aaron for giving me a home and a car in Hobart; my parents, who have always supported me in my writing; my volunteer proofreaders; and Barbara, who urged me to take this on in the first place. The serendipitous kelp forest... EDEN All things are one thing and that one thing is all things—plankton, a shimmering phosphorescence on the sea and the spinning planets and an expanding universe, all bound together by the elastic string of time. It is advisable to look from the tide pool to the stars and then back to the tide pool again.1 John Steinbeck Thoughts of the giant kelp forests once kept me cool through hot school afternoons: fantasties of great towering marine metropolises, where each languid frond harbours a multitude of fish, invertebrates, plankton and algaes. I’d heard they grew in the Pacific Ocean off Monterey, California, far from my Western Australian classroom. When my year eleven biology teacher described the kelp ecosystem it was with diagrams and textbook terminology. We learnt their trophic cascades, food webs, predator-prey relationships. They were the domain of Steinbeck’s mythic scientist Ed Ricketts, the existential unknown of Jack Kerouac’s Big Sur, a model Darwinian paradise. I wanted so much to see ​ ​ them for myself. But I had no idea that my underwater eden could be found closer to home. Giant kelp (Macrocystis pyrifera) once flourished in the cool waters of our southernmost state in ​ ​ ​ ​ Australia. Tasmania, better-known for its dramatic onshore vistas, is one of the few locations worldwide where Macrocystis can grow, along with New Zealand, both American continents, and South Africa. It’s ​ ​ easy to overlook our planet’s submarine cities - excepting, perhaps, conservation superstar the Great Barrier Reef - but they too are experiencing the brunt of global warming and climate change, Macrocystis included. This isn’t just a philanthropic problem. The Tasmanian kelp forests are nurseries ​ for shellfish, including abalone and rock lobster: the two major wild fisheries among the state’s $168 million annual seafood export.2 Ocean ecosystems mean so much to so many, both culturally and economically, and their transformation will be felt deeply in both our hearts and our stomachs. Climate change in the Anthropocene is not as simple as species death. To put it plainly, the planet’s climate bands - long-term weather patterns that prevail at particular latitudes - are creeping gradually towards the north and south poles. In some cases, species are able to pursue their preferred climate, either by physically moving, casting their offspring into uncharted territory, or adapting rapidly in-situ. For others, the rate of change will be too quick to keep up. When foundational or habitat-forming ​ ​ species are subjected to range shifts, the effects pervade throughout the communities they support.3 Macrocystis is home to a myriad of organisms, each with different degrees of ability to follow their ​ preferred climate or adapt to a new one. 1 John Steinbeck, The Log from the Sea of Cortez, The Viking Press, 1951. ​ ​ ​ 2 International Merchandise Exports (2017), Department of Treasury and Finance, Tasmanian ​ ​ Government, 2017. ABS Cat No 5368. 3 Gretta Pecl et al., ‘Biodiversity redistribution under climate change: impacts on ecosystems and human ​ wellbeing’, Science, vol. 355, 2017 ​ ​ The giant kelp forests are fragile. They can only grow to depths of thirty metres. They require cool waters with high nutrient levels, and a rocky seafloor for their gnarled holdfasts to cling to. In a southward migration, Tasmania really is the last post for Macrocystis. With no appropriate substrate ​ ​ further below, Tasmania’s giant kelp forests are, quite literally, falling off the face of the earth. We’ve dealt with major environmental change throughout human history, though climatologists emphasise that nothing quite compares to that of our present epoch. While scientists remain undecided on the basis for a supposedly global flooding event, the Christian allegory of Noah’s Ark offers an interesting model for responses to environmental change, and serves as a reminder that weather, climate, and especially oceans have always been fickle.4 The story also reminds us of mankind’s inherent connection to and responsibility for our fellow species, and this ethical conclusion is echoed in world literature throughout history. In the 21st century, we sit in the midst of a very real, very rapid sea change. In the metaphysical ark of the Anthropocene, the mass migration of species is, at this late stage, unavoidable. But how we - the unusual, communal, electricity-powered Homo sapiens - choose to ​ ​ respond is what will determine the outcome for both our non-human neighbours and our own communities. 4 Genesis, 7:1-24, 8:1-22. King James Version. ​ THRESHOLD Everywhere you go, you always take the weather with you5 Crowded House Gretta Pecl [pictured above] has spent much of her life diving off the east coast of Tasmania. As a marine biologist, her particular fascination was with the movements and migrations of undersea species. Her first focus were squid species, then fish. The ocean’s inhabitants move vertically to access or escape light. They can traverse great distances using currents and tides to find food or family. They might chase after bursts of nutrients, or seek out pockets of ideal temperatures in the vast cold matrix of the sea. Others spend their entire existence fixed to a rocky shelf, with only a shell to protect them against the perilous extremes of the intertidal zone. 5 Crowded House, Weather With You, in Woodface, Capitol, 1992. ​ ​ ​ Gretta working on squid at the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies (IMAS) in Hobart when she began hearing strange anecdotes from fishermen across the state. They reported New South Wales fish species turning up in Tasmanian catches. Conversely, the world-renowned giant kelp forests were vanishing, with the purplish long-spined sea urchins (Centrostephanus rodgersii) appearing as guards of ​ ​ the kelp’s eerie gravesite. When Gretta spoke to international scientists about these changes, it became apparent Tasmania was not an isolated case. Alaskan moose were following a growing shrubland northwards as permafreeze melted. The mangroves of Florida were spreading into salt marshes, where they were previously excluded by a seasonal freeze. Tropical fish in South Africa were turning up further and further south, to follow the warmer waters. In Madagascar, thirty different species of reptiles and amphibians had moved forty metres up their mountain to escape the rising heat.6 Clearly, Tasmania’s changing waters weren’t an isolated case. “I started to get more interested in how reflective the patterns that we were seeing were occurring in other parts of the world,” Gretta told me over coffee. “There is no part of how we operate as a planet that won’t be affected in some way.” But despite the prevalence of climate-driven species migration, study in this area had been loosely scattered across traditionally siloed research fields: marine biology, terrestrial ecology, environmental law, social sciences. Gretta saw a need for researchers from all corners of the globe to share what they knew about this phenomenon. And where better than Hobart, the world’s southernmost state capital, and locus of that southernmost site of Macrocystis? ​ The first ever Species On The Move (SOTM) conference began on February 9, 2016. A public lecture at the waterfront Grand Chancellor Hotel fell on a warm Tuesday evening by Hobart’s standards, the sky shrouded with the haze of recent bushfires. Gretta had teed up five short presentations from leading SOTM researchers - Will Steffen from the Climate Council; Camille Parmesan from the University of Texas; Stephen Williams from James Cook University; Tero Mustonen, a Sami man and representative of Snowchange Cooperative; and of course, Gretta herself - so the public could begin to understand the magnitude of this phenomenon. The mood at this conference was surprisingly upbeat given the somewhat apocalyptic subject matter. Speakers told analogous narratives of cultural loss and environmental disaster to a diverse and varied audience of over 400 members of the public. Gretta said they were just glad so many people had made the effort to show up. “It was incredibly reassuring to see that many people interested, because ultimately that’s what will turn the situation around,” she said. “I think it’s very easy for people that aren’t connected to nature or maybe don’t have a scientific background, not to realise that even at a local scale, like your backyard, the global climate shapes what our planet looks like. That was the point of our public forum, we were trying to get people to make connections between what they see and how everything’s changing... that it’s part of that bigger global pattern.” 6 Gretta Pecl et al., ‘Biodiversity redistribution under climate change: impacts on ecosystems and human ​ wellbeing’, Science, vol. 355, 2017 ​ ​ At the end of the four day conference, forty-one researchers from all corners of the earth pitched in to write Biodiversity redistribution under climate change: impacts on ecosystems and human wellbeing, a ​ ​ review published in Science magazine. The paper points out that the rate of climate change in the ​ ​ twenty-first century exceeds that of the last 65 million years, with unprecedented climate and species shifts globally.7 Despite the upbeat tone of the SOTM conference, Gretta and the other forty experts who wrote the paper showed deep concern.
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