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Isn't the globe warm enough, you wonder, especially as north India goes through an unusually warm November. Of course, scream global-warming experts, quoting newer and newer research findings. But suddenly, there appears to be cause for alarm nearer home. A paper published by a team of oceanographers from the National Institute of Oceanography (NIO), Goa, in the Birtish journal Nature last week talks of how too much laughing gas or nitrous oxide, that potent greenhouse gas, is being produced off the Indian west coast from the waters of the Arabian Sea.

S.W.A. Naqvi, the NIO scientist whose work is showcased in the publication, has been studying the phenomenon for two decades now. "I was always interested in following the global cycle that nitrogen takes," he says, putting forth a hypothesis that will have serious implications. According to him, the use of fertilisers on the west coast, and its runoff into the Arabian Sea may be stimulating the production of nitrous oxide, which is 200 times more dangerous than carbondioxide, resulting in, among other things, a rise in mercury levels in the region.

During the monsoon and after, the waters of the Arabian Sea begin to feel an oxygen pinch. This happens because there is a mixing of waters, and a gradient builds up between water bands, cutting oxygen off for all plant life that thrives on the ocean floor. Starved of oxygen, these plants begin to decay and in the process laughing gas is produced. The fertilisers leaching out through an overburdened land into sea water are only hastening the process.

B.N. Krishnamurty, adviser at the Department of Ocean Development (DOD) under which research in being conducted, says, "It is essentially this depletion of oxygen that made us want to look at the whole phenomenon more closely, and what Naqvi and his team have found is a spin-off from that research."

According to the NIO team, the oxygen levels in the Arabian Sea have been markedly dipping over the past three years. And besides an all-time high concentration of nitrous oxide, hydrogen sulphide, the gas that keeps all life at bay, is also being generated in plenty. Naqvi, however, says this is not unique to west coast of India. This kind of "suboxia happens across the world", in at least 40 coastal sites.

That, perhaps, explains the changing climatic conditions all over. While the other possible effects of the phenomenon are still under study, scientists like Naqvi are cautious about how their findings so far will be received by the international community as global warming, increasingly, is becoming a political rather than an environmental issue. The fight, they know, is not so much against nature as it is with man himself.

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