Dredd Blog: The Extinction of Robust Sea Ports

This series has been about the impact of sea level change as it applies to world seaports.

There is little to no doubt that a large number of seaports, as they exist today, will "go extinct."

Yes, the very thing international sea trade depends on (the oceans) will have caused their demise or their greatest challenge.

The questions about this eventuality are therefore: 1) about a reconstruction, or not, of those seaports, and 2) about the intellectual and philosophical perplexity that will be discussed for centuries into the future.

Nevertheless, it is likely that in any developing scenario, the original port will no longer exist (The Extinction of Robust Sea Ports, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12).

Today's appendices and graphs are the downstream results of technological evolution which have given us the ability to see the seaport catastrophe approaching:

Fig. 2 We Melt Glaciers For You

"When the mercury thermometer was invented in 1714, it took the scientific world by storm. On his transatlantic crossing in the year 1724, Benjamin Franklin recorded water temperatures by periodically dipping a thermometer into the ocean. By 1850, weather stations across the globe had gleaned a record of air temperatures over land. For the first time,scientists could track Earth’s temperature. And over time, it became clear that temperature was rising."

(NASA Missing heat, Scientists search the deep oceans to balance Earth’s energy budget). As it turned out, some 90-93% of the Sun's radiation was flowing into the oceans.

This would eventually lead to the discovery of the green house effect (global warming), which eventually caused Oil-Qaeda to stop bragging about how its products were melting glaciers (Fig. 2), and also caused the military to announce circa 2009 that global warming was a national security risk (Global Climate & Homeland Insecurity).

Then the paid-for research began to abound with 'where da heat at' type papers:

"But after rapid warming in the 1980s and 1990s, the rate seemed to slow. Continued high continental temperatures were offset by curiously cool ocean surfaces. Yet most scientific evidence, and the inexorable increases in heat trapping greenhouse gases, indicated global temperatures should be climbing at a greater rate. This missing heat had to go somewhere—if not in the surface layers, where?"

(ibid). In a recent paper Dredd Blog complained about yet another paper that came out and confused 'signal' with 'noise' and skimmed the surface once again (Quantum Oceanography - 15).

When you hear one of those "where da heat at?" papers, think on these posts (In Search Of Ocean Heat, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10).

"Richard Allan, a professor of climate science at the University of Reading, contends the heat is not really missing. “People are looking for a simple explanation of where the heat is going,” Allan said ... Complicating matters, different ocean layers store and release heat at different rates. Water temperatures near the ocean surface tend to be more variable, because there is a constant heat exchange with the air circulating above. Deeper ocean layers, however, exchange heat more slowly than surface layers and release that stored heat on much longer time scales.... So to find the missing heat, researchers dove into the oceans. Answers in the ocean Scientists still measure ocean temperature by submerging instruments, but now they tap a global network of thousands of submersible floats. Deployed by the Argo project, these meter- long tubes contain temperature, salinity, and pressure sensors. They are designed to dive, drift, and then surface to relay data on ten-day cycles. The project began in 2000 with floats diving to 1,000 meters (0.62 miles), and since 2005, floats have been diving to 2,000 meters (1.24 miles). Argo floats permit researchers to observe deeper layers of the ocean that absorb heat over longer time scales. Once Allan and his colleagues had data from both the floats and the satellite instruments, they could calculate the energy imbalance. They found that the “missing” heat had actually been continuing to build up over the satellite record and the only place it could be was lurking beneath the ocean surface."

(ibid). Why brag about "1,000 meters ... 2,000 meters" when the average ocean depth is "3,682 metres" (is almost half-right sufficient)?

And speaking of understatements:

"The historical evolution of Earth’s energy imbalance can be quantified by changes in the global ocean heat content. However, historical reconstructions of ocean heat content often neglect a large volume of the deep ocean ... "20th century cooling of the deep ocean contributed to delayed acceleration of Earth’s energy imbalance ..."

(Nature Communications). The bigger problem is that the ocean models, and therefore the ocean model makers, do not know what ocean heat is:

"The variable that is currently used for this purpose in ocean models is potential temperature referenced to the sea surface, θ, but it does not accurately represent the conservation of heat ... it is perfectly valid to talk of potential enthalpy, h⁰, as the 'heat content' ...”

(Potential Enthalpy: A Conservative Oceanic Variable for Evaluating Heat Content and Heat Fluxes, McDougall 2003, pp. 945-46). That is because they do not use the 'new' oceanographic standard (TEOS-10), but cling instead to the old standard (EOS 80).

So, that leads us once again to appendices, which are linked-to in the following menu of depths up to 2,000 meters:

(HTML) Single Coastline Countries	(HTML) Multi Coastline Countries	Coastline Graphs
Appendix: A-C	Appendix: A-C	Appendix: A-C
Appendix: D-G	Appendix: D-G	Appendix: D-G
Appendix: H-L	Appendix: H-L	Appendix: H-L
Appendix: M-O	Appendix: M-O	Appendix: M-O
Appendix: P-T	Appendix: P-T	Appendix: P-T
Appendix: U-Z	Appendix: U-Z	Appendix: U-Z

I modified these graphs (third column) to show range, average, and in situ values for the sea levels shown at various seaports in various World Ocean Database zones.

Also, here are 'Sizemographs' from Quantum Oceanography - 15 which show thermal expansion and contraction down to the bottom (>5,000 meters):

Appendices