Eating Chesapeake Bay blue crabs on a hot summer afternoon is one of the greatest joys of living in the East Coast Tidewater region. But the way things are going with ocean acidification, that summer pleasure might be gone in the not too distant future, replaced by extraordinarily negative consequences of our C02 emissions on the waters. Oceans absorb 25 percent of all the C02 we pump into the atmosphere through vehicle exhaust, coal plants, and a myriad of other sources (without oceans, the greenhouse effect would be more severe) but that carbon dioxide is shifting the seas’ Ph balance, making it more acidic. That’s not good in many ways, and a new study shows that the oceans are acidifying 10 times faster than the one of the fastest-known periods of acidification in the earth’s history.

Sailing in the southeastern Atlantic, scientists Andy Ridgwell and Daniela Schmidt of the University of Bristol drilled core samples from the ocean floor and discovered an acidification event 55 million years ago that led to a mass die-off of calcium-based organisms. The higher acid content dissolved the shells of creatures at the base of the food chain (and also reduces the molecules of shell-building material), and it took hundreds of thousands of years for them to recover. New research from Ridgwell and Schmidt shows that today’s acidification is happening exponentially faster, and while the specific consequences of this aren’t known, it doesn’t take a marine biologist to know that shocking the system has potentially catastrophic potential.

“This is an almost unprecedented geological event,” says Ridgwell.

A year ago, well before this new study was released, James Orr of the Marine Environment Laboratories, speaking at an ocean acidification conference, said, “The chemistry is so fundamental and changes so rapid and severe that impacts on organisms appear unavoidable. The questions are now how bad will it be and how soon will it happen.”

What can you do about ocean acidification? It’s caused by C02 emissions, so make the same changes that you would to mediate climate change: Reduce consumption, pursue renewable energy sources, fight coal burning, and urge local and national governments to stop dithering.

The video posted above, “Acid Test”, was produced by National Resources Defense Council and narrated by Sigourney Weave. It serves as a terrific primer to “the other C02 crisis” and explains the issue in cogent, visible ways. If you want to learn more about the University of Bristol study, you can read about it plain English at Yale’s online environmental magazine here or in science-ese via the study itself here.

Finally, if you really want to dig into the topic, check out December’s issue of Oceanography magazine, which is devoted to the topic of ocean acidification and has all its articles available as PDFs. LINK

Tagged as: environment