Pteropod Meltdown In Today's Oceans Echoed By Acidification Evidence From Permian Extinction

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These tiny snails make up the base of many oceanic food webs. Without them, everything in the food chain above them suffers, beginning with salmon and similar fish, then progressing to the species that eat the salmon and so on. Unfortunately, more than half of these snails collected in a recent survey showed extensive damage: Their shells are literally dissolving, killing them off in astounding numbers.

The cause of this die-off, ultimately, is believed to be the rising levels of carbon dioxide. Leaving the chemistry details aside, about a quarter of the CO2 added to the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels is subsequently absorbed by the oceans, making the water more acidic. This change in ocean chemistry reduces the availability of a particular calcium compound that animals such as clams, oysters, mussels and our aforementioned sea snails need to build their shells. Without it, their shells are weakened, developing holes and slowly disintegrating.

This situation isn't entirely new for the planet; about 250 million years ago, the oceans endured similar changes in chemistry. Unfortunately, this past acidification event coincided with the Permian-Triassic extinction. Far worse than the dinosaur-killing extinction of the Cretaceous period, the Permian extinction wiped out more than 90% of marine species. The planet took millions of years to recover, the history of life was forever altered — and the whole thing may have been largely due to increased levels of CO2.

That's the conclusion drawn by many geologists and paleontologists, including Jonathan Payne and his colleagues at Stanford University. Payne's research has helped to show that the chemical signatures of acidification are preserved in rocks deposited during the Permian, and that the species most sensitive to acidification were the ones most severely affected by this ancient biological crisis. The cause of the CO2 increase (volcanic eruptions in that case) was obviously different, but the results seem all too familiar.

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http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-taylor-climate-change-pteropods-20140626-story.html