ocean acidification

Ocean acidification has been called the evil twin of global warming. Carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere is absorbed by ocean water, forming acid in the process. As a result, the acidity of the ocean has increased measurably in recent decades. More acidic oceans could have severe consequences for marine animals and plants, the ecosystems they build, and the economies they drive.

January 23, 2012 | 2:37 PM | By Heather Goldstone

Ocean acidification and the explosion of hockey sticks

flyzipper / flickr

You’ve heard about hockey sticks, right? No, not the actual wood and carbon-fiber things you use to push a puck around on the ice, although those are perfectly nice. What I’m referring to are graphs of the history of various climate factors that are shaped roughly like a hockey stick – a long, relatively flat line that suddenly takes a sharp upward turn around the turn of the 20th century.

The original hockey stick graph was one of global average temperatures over the past 1,000 years. The graph was popularized by Al Gore in his film An Inconvenient Truth, then demonized – along with one of its primary creators, Dr. Michael Mann – by the 2009 ClimateGate email affair. Since then, the hockey stick meme has stayed pretty dormant … until now.

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FILED UNDER: Ocean Change, ocean acidification

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Washington state invokes Clean Water Act for ocean acidification

willapalens / flickr

Oysters - particularly babies - are exquisitely sensitive to ocean acidification.

In the fall of 2010, the EPA issued a memo stating for the record that the Clean Water Act covers ocean acidification, as well as more traditional types of pollution. While widely hailed as an historic call to action, the memo was full of qualifiers and caveats. First and foremost, few states would be expected to have the data necessary to request an “impaired” listing. Perhaps more daunting, such a listing would trigger legal requirements for corrective action – essentially an impossible standard to meet since nothing a state could do on its own would even touch the global phenomenon of ocean acidification.

So was this just political grandstanding destined to go nowhere? Maybe not.

In their latest report to EPA, the state of Washington has listed Puget Sound as “waters of concern” based on the impact of ocean acidification on the local shellfish industry. That’s a strategy that takes advantage of a work-around explicitly mentioned in the memo – demonstrating biological or ecological impacts attributable to ocean acidification, rather than documenting the subtle and slow-moving chemical phenomenon itself. It will be interesting to see whether other states follow suit; it could prove more difficult in areas with less pristine waters facing multiple impacts.

But back to the listing, itself. As explained in a press release from the Center for Biological Diversity, it’s kind of a half-way move:

In its new assessment, Washington again declined to identify coastal waters as “impaired” by acidification — a classification that would have required steps to curb carbon pollution causing acidification. Instead, only Puget Sound was put on the “waters of concern” list, a less urgent category.

This listing may not match the urgency that shellfish growers in the area feel, but it does at least give the problem some official standing.

FILED UNDER: Ocean Change, EPA, ocean acidification, oysters

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Fish may be more susceptible to acid oceans than thought

Mark Kasianowicz / Massachusetts State House Photographer

Massachusetts' 'sacred cod' may be hanging by a string, thanks to a legacy of overfishing and a future made uncertain by climate change.

As if a new assessment questioning the health of Gulf of Maine cod stocks weren’t enough bad news for New England’s fishermen, Nature News this week reports on two new studies that suggest fish may be more susceptible to climate change – particularly impacts on ocean chemistry – than previously thought.

It’s been obvious for some time that cod and other commercially important marine species are feeling the heat, literally. Surface water temperatures around New England have risen 2-4ºF in the past fifty years. Likewise, half of the three dozen marine species monitored by federal fishery scientists have shifted their distributions to match changing water temperatures. Most are moving northward and offshore, but others – like mackerel – have actually moved into shallower, near-shore waters.

The other carbon dioxide problem

Human-produced carbon dioxide emissions do more than raise ocean temperatures. They actually alter the fundamental chemistry of the ocean in a myriad of ways (scary thought, huh?). It all starts with one chemical reaction: water plus carbon dioxide makes carbonic acid. Add enough carbon dioxide, and the pH of the ocean starts to drop. So far we’ve added enough to shift the average pH of the ocean from 8.2 to 8.1 – a deceptively small numeric change that actually reflects a 30% increase in acidity. Thus, the term ‘ocean acidification.’

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FILED UNDER: Fish & Wildlife, Ocean Change, fisheries, ocean acidification

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October 11, 2011 | 10:57 AM | By Heather Goldstone

Maine’s ‘dead muds’ spreading, thanks to ocean acidification

A really open, accessible, and down-to-earth perspective on ocean acidification …

Read more about the impacts of ocean acidification on Maine’s shellfish harvests from the Bangor Daily News.

FILED UNDER: Human Impacts, ocean acidification

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September 8, 2011 | 1:22 PM | By Heather Goldstone

Ocean acidification threatens New Bedford’s revenues

Sifu Renka / Flickr

A dramatic increase in the price of sea scallops accounted for most of New Bedford's fishery revenue in 2010.

Apparently the word of the day is scallops. New Bedford has once again clinched the top spot among fishing ports, no thanks to declining fish landings. What has kept the Whaling City the highest-revenue port is the high price of scallops.

Just as I finished reading the New Bedford Standard Times article to that effect, this tweet came across my desk:

50% US fishery revenue comes from shell-forming mollusks and crustaceans. What impacts will OA have? (Doney #AFS2011)

Heather Galindo, of COMPASS (Communication Partnership for Science and the Sea), appears to be reporting on comments made by Scott Doney, a senior scientist here at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, at the annual meeting of the American Fisheries Society currently going on in Seattle.

For those not familiar with the shorthand, OA is ocean acidification – the shift in the ocean’s acid-base balance caused by rising levels of carbon dioxide absorbed from the atmosphere.

One of the most notable effects of ocean acidification is that it makes it difficult for animals like quahogs, scallops, and oysters to extract the calcium carbonate they need to build their shells. As acidity increases, shells get thinner and more defective, growth slows down, and death rates rise. And that’s in the lab, where diseases, pollution, and predators aren’t factors; death rates may be much higher for thin-shelled, chronically stressed shellfish living in the wild.

Scott Doney, along with research associate Sarah Cooley and other colleagues, has been working to answer the very question Doney posed this morning in Seattle: what are the biological and economic impacts of ocean acidification? Cooley and Doney have said that ocean acidification could reduce U.S. shellfish harvests by as much as a quarter over the next fifty years. Earlier this summer, Cooley and Doney published a comprehensive assessment of vulnerability of shellfish harvests worldwide to ocean acidification and identified likely ‘transition decades’ when water chemistry will no longer support current harvests and major declines will begin to be seen. For the U.S., they predict that will happen in less than two decades.

What will that mean for New Bedford? According to the NOAA, sea scallops accounted for 77% of the city’s $306 million in landings in 2010. That’s $235 million dollars. Reduce that by a quarter, and New Bedford loses almost $60 million dollars a year. That’s serious money.

FILED UNDER: Human Impacts, ocean acidification

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June 20, 2011 | 11:49 AM | By Heather Goldstone

State of the Ocean: Climate change driving oceanic mass extinction

flickr/Photo Extremist

If you thought my State of the Oceans report was scary, get this: An international panel of ocean experts known as the International Programme on the State of the Ocean has released a new report that says human activities are driving marine life extinct at an unprecedented and accelerating pace. No sugar coating there.

The group points to problems like pollution and overfishing, but says that rising levels of carbon dioxide from fossil fuel combustion pose the greatest risks. The State of the Ocean experts aren’t alone in their thinking; many scientists think the ocean is in the early stages of the sixth mass extinction – the first in the history of the Earth to be caused by humans.

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FILED UNDER: Ocean Change, ocean acidification, overfishing, sea surface temperature

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June 8, 2011 | 12:31 AM | By Heather Goldstone

The State of the Oceans 2011

flickr/epzibah

Welcome to World Oceans Day 2011. Since 2008, the United Nations has recognized June 8th as a day to celebrate, learn about, and take action on behalf of the oceans that cover three quarters of our planet and sustain all life on Earth – what author Julia Whitty calls our Deep Blue Home.

Last year at this time, oil was still spewing into the Gulf of Mexico from the mangled riser pipe of BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig. All told, more than 4 million barrels of oil were spilled, and nearly 800,000 gallons of the chemical dispersant Correxit were injected deep into the Gulf. On the one-year anniversary of the explosion that killed eleven men and started what President Obama called “the greatest environmental disaster of its kind,” oil spill researcher Chris Reddy told me it was still too soon to know how much oil and dispersant remains in the Gulf and what the long-term ecological impacts will be.

U.S. Coast Guard

The Deepwater Horizon in flames.

This year, as we recognize World Oceans Day, we wait for news of another environmental disaster – the ongoing nuclear crisis in Japan. Yesterday, Japan’s nuclear agency doubled their estimate of how much radioactive material has been released from the Fukushima Daichi nuclear power plant that was crippled by the March 11th earthquake and tsunami. In the weeks immediately following the disaster, levels of radioactivity in surrounding ocean waters skyrocketed. Now Bloomberg has reported that radioactive water may once again begin flowing into the ocean as it overflows service trenches. The announcement adds to the urgency of a research expedition now underway to map the location, type, and levels of radioactive contamination in the Pacific Ocean.

And yet, despite their devastating effects, these dramatic environmental disasters are not the grea

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ocean acidification

RECENT POSTS

January 23, 2012 | 2:37 PM | By Heather Goldstone

Ocean acidification and the explosion of hockey sticks

FILED UNDER: Ocean Change, ocean acidification

January 13, 2012 | 11:46 AM | By Heather Goldstone

Washington state invokes Clean Water Act for ocean acidification

FILED UNDER: Ocean Change, EPA, ocean acidification, oysters

December 13, 2011 | 10:51 AM | By Heather Goldstone

Fish may be more susceptible to acid oceans than thought

The other carbon dioxide problem

FILED UNDER: Fish & Wildlife, Ocean Change, fisheries, ocean acidification

October 11, 2011 | 10:57 AM | By Heather Goldstone

Maine’s ‘dead muds’ spreading, thanks to ocean acidification

FILED UNDER: Human Impacts, ocean acidification

September 8, 2011 | 1:22 PM | By Heather Goldstone

Ocean acidification threatens New Bedford’s revenues

FILED UNDER: Human Impacts, ocean acidification

June 20, 2011 | 11:49 AM | By Heather Goldstone

State of the Ocean: Climate change driving oceanic mass extinction

FILED UNDER: Ocean Change, ocean acidification, overfishing, sea surface temperature

June 8, 2011 | 12:31 AM | By Heather Goldstone

The State of the Oceans 2011

And yet, despite their devastating effects, these dramatic environmental disasters are not the grea