they are testing them for radiation poisoning.

The radiation had definitely made it to California.

In a troubling new discovery, scientists studying ocean waters off California, Oregon and Washington have found the first evidence that increasing acidity in the ocean is dissolving the shells of a key species of tiny sea creature at the base of the food chain.

The animals, a type of free-floating marine snail known as pteropods, are an important food source for salmon, herring, mackerel and other fish in the Pacific Ocean.

Those fish are eaten not only by millions of people every year, but also by a wide variety of other sea creatures, from whales to dolphins to sea lions.

If the trend continues, climate change scientists say, it will imperil the ocean environment.

"These are alarm bells," said Nina Bednarsek, a scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Seattle who helped lead the research. "This study makes us understand that we have made an impact on the ocean environment to the extent where we can actually see the shells dissolving right now."

More: http://www.mercurynews.com/science/ci_25664175/climate-change-pacific-ocean-acidity-dissolving-shells-key

...then it'll be obliterated and lifeless, too!

Just make sure Uranus isn't off to the east when it gets done traveling another couple billion miles. Cuz then it would totally fry Uranus.

Even if Fukushima melted down ON the California coast, it wouldn't be having this kind of impact. And after crossing a few thousand miles of ocean and decaying for two years?

No, this is what a century of burning fossil fuels has brought us. Death by a thousand cuts rather than one major blow.

About radiation on the west coast and on the fish.

There hasn't been a single report of radiation on the west coast that implied that it could be having any impact at all... let alone something like this.

Until now, the impact on marine species from increasing ocean acidity because of climate change has been something that was tested in tanks in labs, but which was not considered an immediate concern such as forest fires and droughts.

The new study, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, a scientific journal based in England, changes that.

"The pteropods are like the canary in the coal mine. If this is affecting them, it is affecting everything in the ocean at some level," said one of the nation's top marine biologists, Steve Palumbi, director of Stanford University's Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove.

....

If people reduce emissions of fossil fuels, cutting carbon dioxide levels in the decades ahead, the damage to the oceans can still be limited, he said.

"But if we keep on the emissions profile we have now, by 2100 the oceans will be so harmed it's hard to imagine them coming back from that in anything less than thousands of years," Palumbi said.

"We are in a century of choice," he said. "We can choose the way we want it to go."

http://www.mercurynews.com/science/ci_25664175/climate-change-pacific-ocean-acidity-dissolving-shells-key


Hatrack, would you consider cross-posting this in general discussion?
The very survival of most lifeforms on the planet is worthy of major political discussions.
Thanks.

there just aren't enough fish out there to support the animals that feed on them....

by the time we put some controls on industrial fishing, the fish will be so depopulated that it will probably take two to three decades for the fisheries to recover - not to where they once were but to the point that about 1/20th (down to 1/50th) the current catch could be supported..

Man is going to kill off most life in the sea even before GW's ocean acidification does it.



http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/03/22/eco.ted.danson.oped/