Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumLBN Cross-Post - Animals Already Beginning To Dissolve In Southern Ocean
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Source: New Scientist
Animals are already dissolving in Southern Ocean acid
18:00 25 November 2012 by Michael Marshall
"This is actually happening now," says Geraint Tarling of the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, UK. He and colleagues captured free-swimming sea snails called pteropods from the Southern Ocean in early 2008 and found under an electron microscope that the outer layers of their hard shells bore signs of unusual corrosion.
As well as warming the planet, the carbon dioxide we emit is changing the chemistry of the ocean. CO2 dissolves in water to form carbonic acid, making the water less alkaline. The pH is currently dropping at about 0.1 per century, faster than any time in the last 300 million years.
Lab experiments have shown that organisms with hard shells, such as corals and molluscs, will suffer as a result. To build their shells, corals and molluscs need to take up calcium carbonate from the water, but more carbonic acid means more hydrogen ions in the water. These react with carbonate ions, making them unavailable to form calcium carbonate.
Aragonite shortage
The most vulnerable animals are those, like pteropods, that build their shells entirely from aragonite, a form of calcium carbonate that is very sensitive to extra acidity. By 2050, there will be a severe shortage of aragonite in much of the ocean.
Read more: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn22531-animals-are-already-dissolving-in-southern-ocean-acid.html
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http://www.democraticunderground.com/1014316802
phantom power
(25,966 posts)NoOneMan
(4,795 posts)Ten years ago the public was flooded with warning about the seas rising from CO2 emissions. We basically said: "so what? we can live with that". And gradually we got used to the idea of what we envisioned as the worse-case scenario.
With acidification, there just may be no way forward. Geo-engineering is the only viable "solution", and its hardly viable.