Hi there, The following post from Dr Joaquim Goes is in reply to Santosh Helekar in connection with 'Shrinking Himalayan snow threatens fish off Goan coast'.
Melvyn ------------------------------ Dear Santosh, Thank you very much for your interest in our article. You do raise some a valid issue regarding the title of the paper. It does give the impression that the warming trend would be beneficial to the Arabian Sea. I must admit that we made a mistake in assuming that our readership would be limited to oceanographers and climate change scientists. To them the pitfalls of larger and more widespread blooms of phytoplankton in the Arabian Sea are perhaps clearer. We should have had a few more lines in the last two paragraphs of the paper to make our story clear to non-specialists as well. But as usual with papers in Science, authors tend to stay too close to their language because of strict limitations on the number of words you are allowed to use. I was forwarded this link by NASA last week. It is an example of how extensive blooms of phytoplankton are impacting coastal fisheries off Oman. http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Study/oman/ Joaquim ---------------- Sun May 1 10:45:25 2005 My reading of the original Science paper led me to the wrong conclusion, namely that the increase in phytoplankton biomass would mean more fish. Indeed, the title of the paper is quite misleading to a non-expert like me. The title is: "Warming of the Eurasian Landmass Is Making the Arabian Sea More Productive". The paper also does not explain what exactly is meant when the authors state that their findings have "immediate and important bearing on regional fisheries". This is how they end their paper: "Our findings raise the intriguing possibility that the western as well as the central regions of the Arabian Sea could witness more widespread blooms of phytoplankton if the mid-latitudinal continental warming trend and the decline in winter snow cover over the Northern Hemisphere continue. Although our findings have an immediate and important bearing on regional fisheries, the implications of a more productive Arabian Sea go far beyond that; for example, to our planet's climate. The Arabian Sea hosts a distinct, basin-wide oxygen minimum zone between 150 and 1000 m (35�37), whose presence has a substantial impact on marine elemental cycles, in particular those linked to the production of climatically relevant trace gases (37). The changing productivity of the Arabian Sea could thus have far-reaching consequences for the oxygen minimum zone, whose existence is regulated by a balance between the ventilation of intermediate depths and oxygen consumption during the oxidation of organic matter produced in the euphotic column (36, 37)." I hope Helga clarifies this issue. Cheers, Santosh
