Oceans of the Future

The enormously knowledgeable Dr. James D. Reimer and I have a highly interesting and timely book in the works…. if you are a quality popular science publisher and want to take on our book, please contact us!

Oceans of the Future

The next ten thousand years of the most important part of our planet

Dr. Klaus M. Stiefel and Dr. James D. Reimer

Synopsis

Any educated and curious contemporary knows that the oceans of our planet are plagued by environmental problems. We hear about coral bleaching, overfishing and excessive plastic trash in the ocean. But there is no clear narrative for an interested layperson as to where these problems will lead to in the long run. To understand the possible new normal for life in the oceans, we need to first understand the main players of marine biodiversity, such as fishes, corals and other invertebrates (animals without a spine). We will then look at the ocean’s human-made problems in detail: how are the organisms crucial to the marine ecosystem affected by the warming and increasingly acidic oceans? How is the marine ecosystem altered by constantly removing gigantic numbers of its organisms for human consumption? Once we understand the answers to these crucial questions, we can ask: What will the final result of this human mad dash to empty, warm and acidify the oceans be? We offer both optimistic and pessimistic predictions for how the oceans could look within one or a few human life-spans,  and we speculate how the Anthropocene, the present period of significant human influence over many planetary systems, will divert ocean ecosystems in the next ten thousand years and longer.

The book aims to explain these topics in jargon-free language comprehensible to the interested layperson, without dumbing down any of the science. The synthesis we attempt should be interesting for any citizen of the inappropriately named Planet Earth (really, it’s Planet Ocean), whether private individual, policy maker, or fellow scientist.

While we mention temperate and polar habitats, our focus is on tropical oceans, both because that’s where the apex of marine biodiversity is present, and because this is where we are based (Okinawa and the Philippines).

The book is illustrated with high quality photographs by the authors.