Apr 11 2009
Trouble in the High Seas
This isn’t about piracy, although pirates seem to be a huge problem lately. This is about ocean acidification, a much bigger problem than most people realize. For one thing, the growing ocean acidification might end a lot of the life in the ocean, especially that associated with coral reefs and with shells, and that would lead to massive food shortages around the world. Hundreds of millions of people depend on the ocean as a major food source. Why is the ocean becoming more acidic, and what is the problem?
This information is from a recent radio interview with Dr. Richard A. Feely, an Oceanographer at the NOAA Pacific Marine Laboratory in Seattle, and a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union. His main area of focus is carbon cycles in the ocean, and this very problem.
At a 3-day summit in Copenhagen last month, European scientists warned that we’re creating ocean conditions not seen since dinosaurs walked on the earth, 65 million years ago. Human beings have recreated these hostile conditions in about 200+ years by burning fossil fuels and with harmful agriculture practices, and as a result, carbon emissions continue to rise and affect the oceans.
Ocean acidification isn’t complicated. As we burn coal and oil and natural gas and gasoline for fuel and energy, all that CO2 is released into the atmosphere. Over about the past 250 years, we have released about 540 billion metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. About a third of that has been absorbed by the oceans. Carbon dioxide (CO2) is a gas that immediately reacts with sea water, and it forms a weak acid called carbonic acid . This carbonic acid quickly dissociates and releases a hydrodyne, which gives the ocean its acidity. This increase in carbonic acid over time has increased the acidity in the last 200 years of about 30%. With the projections of the use of fossil fuels in the future, we could see increases in acidity by 150% by the end of this century. This is what has scientists hugely concerned.
The impact is already happening. The changes have already been measured, and Dr. Feely said he has spent most of his career doing these measurements, the resulting information he calls “significant”. In just over 20 years, he and his fellow scientists have seen changes of about 6% rise in acidity of the oceans. Given the vast amount of water in the ocean, this is a huge change. Some recent papers suggest that these higher levels are starting to have significant impacts on marine organisms.
Carbonic acid combines with carbonate ion, a building block of calcium carbonate forming organisms, including abalone, oysters and other marine life with shells. The shells become thin and weak, which means this makes it harder for this organisms to form their shells and skeletons. Coral reef organism structures are made of this calcium carbonate, so this makes them grow much more slowly and they can’t keep up with sea level rise. Snails and other organisms’ shells are already becoming more thin and brittle. This is happening at lot at the high northern and high southern latitudes in the sea.
Another reason to stop CO2 rise now — at some point, if this continues, all marine life with shells may disappear entirely, as well as our coral reefs. This is not an ocean we would recognize and it would drastically affect world food supply.
Life would be simpler if we could go back to the days of yester year when there was not the modern inventions to today that polute the world in which we live, or deplete the ozone, or pump to much carbon dioxide into the air. In the old days - man lived off the ground, travled by horse, and heated by wood. Thanks for sharing.