By Sandra Steingraber, SEHN senior scientist

When marine biologist and author Rachel Carson released her popular account of oceanography, The Sea Around Us, in 1951, almost none of her readers had seen visual images of the living realm beneath the surface of the ocean’s waves. Fiber optics and low-light cameras would eventually bring moving pictures of this underwater world into our living rooms, but in the mid-20th century, these tools did not yet exist.

The bathyscaphe christened Trieste would not descend into the Mariana Trench until 1960, and the research submersible named Alvin would not begin operations until 1964.

And yet, piqued by developments in radar, echolocation, and submarine operations during World War II, public interest in deep sea life was high. What did it look like under the surface of the sea? The Sea Around Us attempted to fill a curiosity void. Carson turned data into wondrous imagery that created a kind of underwater documentary with words that transported readers into oceanic depths.

And the book became a runaway bestseller. The Sea Around Us won the National Book Award, was serialized in The New Yorker, and provided its author with enough financial independence that she could resign her day job as an editor of government brochures.

In Carson’s narrative, biblical in tone and metrical patterns, the ocean was not the setting of an epic story but its main character. Indifferent, indomitable, magisterial, ruthless. The creator and sustainer of life on the planet—and final repository of its constituent parts. Both cradle and grave for us all. Impervious to desecration. The ocean, she wrote, is “too big and too vast and its forces…too mighty to be affected by human activity.”

Less than a decade later, Carson issued a correction. To the second edition of The Sea Around Us, Carson added new material about leaking barrels of radioactive waste in deep-sea basins, plankton siphoning radioactivity up the marine food chain, and patterns of global fallout from aboveground atomic bomb testing.

In October 1960, in her preface to the re-release, Carson admitted she was wrong. Writing darkly about the practice of dumping radioactive waste into the world’s oceans, she urged her readers to relinquish old beliefs and embrace an emerging truth:

…there has long been a certain comfort in the belief that the sea, at least, was inviolate, beyond man’s ability to change and to despoil.

But this belief, unfortunately, has proved to be naïve. In unlocking the secrets of the atom, modern man has found himself confronted with a frightening problem—what to do with the most dangerous materials that have ever existed…. The stark problem that faces him is whether he can dispose of these lethal substances without rendering the earth uninhabitable.

No account of the sea today is complete unless it takes note of this ominous problem…. The whole practice, despite protestations of safety by the regulatory agency, rests on the most insecure basis of fact.

***

Carson came so close, in the second edition of The Sea Around Us, to a working theory of climate change. The chapter she titled “The Global Thermostat” documents how ocean currents circulate energy and water and so regulate Earth’s climate.

Looking at data on long-term trends in ice formation, she correctly concluded that Earth’s polar regions were heating up:

But for the present the evidence that the top of the world is growing warmer is to be found on every hand. The recession of the northern glaciers is going on at such a rate that many smaller ones have already disappeared. If the present rate of melting continues others will soon follow.

And yet she did not make the connection between melting icecaps and the rise of heat-trapping emissions from fossil fuel combustion.

It would be wrong to fault her for failing to see it. The evidence was simply not available to her. Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Observatory, with the longest record of direct measurements of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, only started collecting data in 1958.

The first subtle evidence for rising sea surface temperatures came in 1970.

The dataset documenting loss of oxygen in the world’s oceans also began in 1970.

The phenomenon of marine heat waves—triggered by high-pressure systems that stall over the open ocean and act like a magnifying glass to the sun’s rays—were finally recognized in 2011.

At about the same time, marine biologists confirmed that superheated currents of water prompt corals to expel the algae that live symbiotically inside their polyps and provide them food (and also their brilliant colors).

Oceans absorb about one-quarter of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. When entering seawater, that carbon dioxide converts to carbonic acid. We’ve known those geochemical facts for a while. But the first evidence that rising ocean acidity is corroding the skin of sharks only came in 2019. As precise and prescient a scientist as Carson was—able to spot emerging ecological trends within and across small and disparate datasets—she did not forecast the worldwide dissolving of sharks.

But now we have actual evidence that this process is ongoing. Indeed, so profound and systemic is the ongoing global climate crisis that it is hardly possible to overstate the level of peril now confronting the world’s oceans or to exaggerate the magnitude of harms afflicting or soon to afflict every creature living within them.

Hence, for example, we have ample data available to us to understand, in ways that Carson could not, that coral reefs—which offer food and shelter for fully one-third of all marine life in the ocean—are exceedingly vulnerable to both ocean acidification and marine heat waves, each of which potentiate the damage caused by the other. Namely, acid water brings frailty to the reefs, thinning and fracturing their calcium carbonate skeletons, while superheated currents evict their algal partners, causing bleaching and starvation.

The cause of both is a ruinous dependency on fossil fuels.

***

In March 2011, following an earthquake-induced tsunami, the Fukushima nuclear plant flooded and melted down. Radiation spilled into the atmosphere and prompted mass evacuations.

Twelve years later, as I am writing, news breaks that Japan is preparing, over vigorous public protest, to begin dumping into the Pacific Ocean one million metric tons of radioactive wastewater collected from the wreckage of the plant. It’s a project that will go on for the next 30 years as the tanks currently holding the contaminated water are reaching capacity.

The United Nations International Atomic Agency has deemed the environmental and public health impacts of this plan, which relies on old-school ocean-dumping to dilute bioconcentrating radionuclides, to be…negligible.

The whole practice, despite protestations of safety by the regulatory agency, rests on the most insecure basis of fact.

In this same week, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists have announced that the prolonged marine heat wave off the south Florida coast—which started in July and is forecast to last until October—has already devastated Florida’s barrier reefs and may kick off a global coral bleaching event. In July, the southern Florida Keys experienced their highest recorded water temperatures.

So, here we are, 70-plus years after the publication of The Sea Around Us, in possession of three things that our smartest, most eloquent marine biologist-author did not have: high-quality, full-color, cinematic images of the shark-filled seas collected at all its depths, from the coral-filled coastal waters to the inky ocean floors; a working theory of climate change that explains how heat-trapping gases from fossil fuel extraction and combustion are warming and acidifying seawater; and an abundance of evidence that shows us that the world’s oceans are not so much awesome, formidable, and untouchable, but damaged, fragile, and undergoing acts of de-creation.

The problem is not that we don’t have enough movies about life below the plunging waves. And it’s not that we don’t have enough evidence for the ongoing harm of marine ecosystems to predict where this situation is headed or that we have failed to discover that bioaccumulation means that dilution can never be the solution to pollution.

The problem is that regulatory policies pretend that we still live in 1951 even though filmmaking and science have marched on. And that’s a political problem. As I’ll discuss in September’s column.

Parts of this essay are adapted from the introduction to Rachel Carson’s SEA TRILOGY (Library of America, 2021) edited by Sandra Steingraber.

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The RePercussion Section: The Dying Sea Around Us