Oceanographers have described a growing number of dead zones, areas of the sea which, for one reason or the other are deserts, devoid of life, and have stated that these desert areas are growing in number. Until now mobile marine life forms could move out of these zones and into fertile areas of sea, but what would be the case when the dead zones outnumbered the live zones and coalesced to include most of the oceans?
Animals and plankton, when they die, rarely sink to the bottom of the ocean; they are eaten before they can descend so far and are therefore not given a chance to rot. But what would be the result of a massive die-off of animal and plant life throughout the depth of the ocean from top to bottom? With no scavengers to eat the corpses they will sink into the anaerobic depths where the bacteria will take over completely and rot the corpses producing toxic decomposition gasses such as putrecine and cadaverine, the essential scents of putrefaction.
This process goes on all the time, but scavengers consume the greater part of the dead biomass and keep the rot to tolerable levels.
Dissolve some beef bouillon in water in a closed jar and leave it for a week in the warmth. If, at the end of that time the jar has not exploded it will contain a foamy, stinking broth.
Our oceans can be conceived as one big jar of liquid and our atmosphere is the cap on that jar held down by gravity. The huge biomass of plants and animals within these waters, on dying without scavengers to consume them, would be left to decay and increase the rot to such an extent that the seas would be turned into a foaming, stinking bouillon by the bacteria.
And so I sit here in Switzerland at an altitude of 520 meters and visualize clean white-caps on the waves converted to stinking yellow froth and wonder if the sweet scent of green fields now filling my nostrils will not someday be replaced by the putrid smell of death due to deep water oil drilling.
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