Wednesday 9 September was a long day. Just another day of ocean conservationing, really.
My first stop was Westminster, where Valentina Crast and the Sea Shepherd Global team were presenting their latest report on the grindadráp, the pilot whale hunts in the Faroe Islands, to MPs. My frustration came from knowing that this fight still has a very long way to go, despite all the evidence showing why the hunts should end. I hope to return to the Faroes later this year and meet some of the people who want change.
I then headed across London to Kanaloa House in Soho for the Ocean Photographer of the Year event, held by Oceanographic and Blancpain.
I walked around the photographs, lost in complete awe and wonder at what the ocean holds, until I reached Karsten Michels’ image of a mutilated pilot whale in the Faroe Islands. I was excited about the event because my day to day can be tough. I’m either campaigning to stop commercial whaling and captivity, or writing about the failing systems that are affecting the ocean.
Having that respite interrupted by an image of what I’d been talking to people about a few hours earlier was jarring, but I was also glad to see it. The ocean is, of course, filled with beauty, but it’s also full of horror, and hiding that from the people in the room wouldn’t tell its full story.
The overall prize went to Julien Anton for a photograph of a male seahorse with two tiny juveniles beside him in the waters of Mo’orea. Jenny Stock received the Female Fifty Fathoms Award, whose recipient is nominated by fellow photographers rather than entering herself.
Late that same evening, Iceland’s government published its parliamentary programme. A permanent whaling ban was in it, although not in the form some of the first headlines suggested.
That’s the lead this week. After that, two pieces of science that resurfaced in the news over the past few days: one modelling what thousands of offshore wind turbines could do to the North Sea, and another asking which organisms were actually carrying carbon down through the ocean. Two quick hits and a hard truth after that.
Deep Dives
Iceland has scheduled a review of its whaling law. A permanent ban is one of the options.
Iceland’s government has placed a full review of the country’s 1949 Whaling Act on its programme for February 2027. The official parliamentary programme says the bill will draw on a working group’s report about how whaling is governed and regulated.
It says particular consideration will be given to the group’s views on a permanent ban, and the review must consider questions under Iceland’s constitution involving freedom to work and property rights.
Those questions could affect what any ban covered, when it began, and what happened to licences already granted. The programme doesn’t say what conclusion the government has reached.
No bill has been published, and there is nothing yet showing what would be prohibited, when any ban might take effect or how the government would deal with licences already in place.
While the government prepared that review, the 2026 hunting season continued. Iceland’s Marine and Freshwater Research Institute advised catch limits that would allow up to 150 fin whales to be killed across two management areas. Around 80 fin whales (classified as Vulnerable on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List) have been killed so far this season.
The fin-whale hunt is carried out by Hvalur hf, the company run by Kristján Loftsson. In December 2024, Iceland’s outgoing government granted separate licences for fin-whale and minke-whale hunting. Hvalur received the fin-whale licence; a separate minke-whale licence went to Tjaldtangi ehf.
The government described the licences as covering a total of five years and being extended annually. It didn’t explain whether each annual extension required a new decision or happened automatically. The parliamentary programme also doesn’t say whether a future prohibition would apply to those licences.
A permanent ban has now entered Iceland’s formal parliamentary work. Whether the government will include one in its bill, and what it could mean for the current licences, remain unanswered.
Thousands of offshore wind turbines could change more than the wind above the North Sea.
Offshore wind is central to Europe’s attempt to cut the emissions warming the ocean. The turbines also stand in the sea, where their foundations and wakes can change the water around them.
Mongabay returned to that question this week, bringing two modelling studies from earlier this year back into the news.
A turbine affects the sea in two main ways. Its blades remove energy from the wind, reducing the force that the wind applies to the water below. Its foundation stands in the current like a post in a river, slowing the flow and creating turbulence. Both effects leave wakes that can travel beyond the turbine itself.
Nils Christiansen, Ute Daewel and Corinna Schrum published a study in Communications Earth & Environment on 13 January. They ran a detailed North Sea model using weather and ocean conditions from 2008 to 2017. One set of simulations represented wind farms operating or being built in 2023. Another represented a much larger possible layout in 2050. Everything that follows is model output, not a measurement of what the North Sea is doing now.
In the 2023 scenario, wind wakes reduced average surface-current speeds by around 10 per cent. Drag from turbine foundations had about half that effect. Together, the two kinds of wake produced reductions of 20 per cent or more in some areas containing several groups of turbines.
Temperature moved in both directions. Across the German Bight, reduced wind produced average summer surface warming of up to 0.05°C. Close to some wind farms, turbulence around the foundations pulled colder water upwards and produced local surface cooling of 0.15°C or more.
The 2050 scenario produced changes across a wider area. Average surface-current speeds fell by 5 to 15 per cent across much of the central and southern North Sea. The reduction exceeded 20 per cent in the German Bight, where the researchers said the combination of many turbines and naturally slow currents probably increased the effect.
Across most of the modelled area, the average sea-surface temperature rose by roughly 0.05 to 0.15°C. A few wind-farm areas in the German Bight cooled instead. The annual warming of around 0.1°C remained within the North Sea’s natural year-to-year variation of about 1°C. The authors also noted that it was roughly one tenth of the warming projected for the region from climate change this century.
A second modelling study, led by Jiayue Chen and published in the same journal on 14 March, followed the sediment. It found that wind farms could change the amount and direction of sediment moving through some places by up to 30 per cent. In the model, as much as 1.5 million tonnes of mud and 70,000 tonnes of organic carbon were redistributed each year. It also suggested that wind farms retained about 1.5 per cent of the sediment carried into the North Sea by rivers, changing where mud and carbon settled and how the open sea connected to coastal areas such as the Wadden Sea.
The results depended on water depth, currents, turbine numbers, location and the way the model represented some complicated processes. The researchers’ 3,000-metre result is therefore a comparison from one set of simulations, not a universal safe distance.
In those simulations, however, the mixing effects barely accumulated where the researchers assumed about 3,000 metres between turbines. At 1,000 metres or less, the model produced much stronger areas of turbulence. Turbines installed in the North Sea by 2023 were, on average, about 900 to 1,300 metres apart.
What reached a trap 1,000 metres below the South China Sea.
Cyanobacteria are tiny, single-celled organisms that use sunlight to make energy and take in carbon. For decades, many ocean models have treated them as poor at carrying that carbon into deep water. The usual reasoning is simple: large cells sink and small ones don’t.
The biological carbon pump is the name scientists give to the different ways carbon moves from sunlit surface water into the deep ocean. Once it gets deep enough, some of it can remain away from the atmosphere for centuries. Many models give larger phytoplankton, including diatoms, the leading role in that journey.
A paper published in AGU Advances on 30 August challenges that assumption. Eos highlighted it on 10 September, which is why an older set of samples entered the news this week.
The researchers studied one station in the northern South China Sea. A sediment trap moored at about 1,000 metres collected sinking material between June 2009 and May 2010. The team compared it with information about surface communities gathered during 19 research cruises between 2004 and 2015. This wasn’t a snapshot of the ocean today.
Different groups of phytoplankton leave different carbon signatures in the amino acids they produce. The researchers measured those signatures in the material caught by the trap and used a statistical model to estimate which groups had supplied the carbon.
The community at the surface changed with the seasons. Cyanobacteria dominated when biological production was lower, while larger microalgae became dominant when production increased. The balance was much more stable in the material collected at 1,000 metres. Cyanobacteria supplied most of the sinking carbon throughout the year, including when larger microalgae dominated closer to the surface.
The paper suggests two reasons. Carbon from larger microalgae was broken down more heavily as it passed through the ocean’s twilight zone, the dim layer between about 100 and 1,000 metres. Cyanobacteria could become caught inside larger clumps of material containing mineral particles. Those clumps helped carry the carbon down and may have protected some of it from being consumed by microbes. The researchers inferred that mechanism from their data; they didn’t watch individual cells make the journey.
This may help explain why colder parts of the ocean dominated by large phytoplankton don’t always store carbon more efficiently than warm, nutrient-poor waters filled with cyanobacteria. It doesn’t prove that the same process operates everywhere.
This was one year of trap material from one station in one basin, and the method hasn’t yet produced the same result in the North Atlantic or Southern Ocean, and the authors say its wider importance still needs to be tested.
At that northern South China Sea station, cyanobacteria supplied an estimated 67 per cent, plus or minus 2 per cent, of the sinking organic carbon collected at 1,000 metres.
Quick Hits
On 10 September, the Financial Times reported that provisional NOAA data had recorded 100 consecutive days on which the average global sea-surface temperature set a record for that date, beginning on 2 June. The report didn’t state the geographical bounds or baseline used for that calculation, so the figure should be treated as provisional. A developing El Niño is adding to the heat, while human-caused climate change remains the long-term driver. These global averages are different from marine heatwaves, which measure unusual warmth in particular places. Copernicus Marine Service reported that about 82 per cent of the global ocean had experienced marine heatwave conditions of varying strength by the end of June.
ClientEarth and Legambiente, supported by Blue Marine Foundation, have launched legal action seeking stronger protection for two Italian marine sites where they say bottom trawling continues. One lies in Tuscan waters inside the Pelagos Sanctuary. The other, Litorale di Gallipoli – Isola di Sant’Andrea, lies off Apulia and contains seagrass meadows and reef habitat. The organisations say authorities have failed to map habitats properly, assess the risks from bottom trawling and take measures to prevent damage. I haven’t seen the underlying legal filing, so those remain the organisations’ description of the case. Disclosure: I hold a retainer with Blue Marine Foundation.
Hard Truth From The Sea
So what is the thread that tirs all these stories together this week? The first description was never enough. The photography exhibition was full of beauty, and it also held an image of a mutilated pilot whale. Iceland’s programme contains a review, with a permanent ban as only one option. Offshore wind cuts emissions, while its turbines can change currents, temperature and sediment. A global heat record doesn’t describe every stretch of ocean, and the groups bringing the Italian case say bottom trawling continues inside two protected sites.
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See you next week.
Luke
Always a great read. Never easy to read. Thank you