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Blue Machine
How The Ocean Shapes Our World
Helen Czerski
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Thomas Midgley notorious for two of most noxious chemicals of C20 - leaded petrol and CFCs for refrigerators - but he never had to face up to the consequences. Midgley contracted polio, and died in 1944 when a contraption he'd rigged up to allow him to get out of bed unaided, misfired and strangled him.
CFCs don't break down, and a percentage of them fall in the ocean. Mostly they stay in surface layer, but there are a few underwater waterfalls, such as the Denmark Strait Overflow (the bigeest waterfall in the world), where we can track CFCs in 'rivers' at the bottom of the ocean. And because the concentration of CFCs increased until phase out after 1987 Montreal Protocol.
The CFC labelled water flows steadily south down the western Atlantic (while the Gulf Stream in surface waters flows north). Water that left the surface near Greenland 40 years ago is now off coast of Brazil, 10,000 km from start.
The chalk of the White Cliffs of Dover comes from a phytoplankton called coccolithophone. 100 million years ago huge blooms of these grew in warm shallow seas. There were so many that the garzers couldn't keep up. The phtoplankton grew tiny shells for protection. When they died, they piled up on the sea floor, 100s of meters thick, the weight squeezing the layers together to make chalk.
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