Seas turn to acid as they absorb global pollution

[acmavm]

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/environment/story.jsp?story=546761

By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor
01 August 2004

<snip>

The world's oceans are sacrificing themselves to try to stave off global warming, a major international research programme has discovered.

Their waters have absorbed about half of the carbon dioxide emitted by human activities over the past two centuries, the 15-year study has found. Without this moderating effect, climate change would have been much more rapid and severe.

But in the process the seas have become more acid, threatening their very life. The research warns that this could kill off their coral reefs, shellfish and plankton, on which all marine life depends.

News of the alarming conclusions of the research - headed by US government scientists - follows the discovery, reported in Friday's Independent, of a catastrophic failure of North Sea birds to breed this summer, thought to be the result of global warming.

<snip>
The research also explodes a heavily touted "solution" to global warming. Critics of international action, including members of the Bush administration, say that there is little need to curb carbon dioxide emissions because the gas could be collected and injected into the oceans for disposal. However, the study shows that this cure could be even worse than the disease.

-MORE-

[NMDemDist2]

1. wow

:kick:

[flewellyn]

2. Maybe the cure would be...

A really, really, really, really big TUMS.

[snowFLAKE]

3. SomeDay the seas will have Had Enough

And will turn on us, just like that lake in Africa (Lake Nyos?) that belched out a huge burp of carbon dioxide and killed a few thousand people. The Ocean, being much bigger, no doubt will be Much Deadlier.

[magnet180]

4. Ahh the danger

of having a media oulet regurgitate facts.

The oceans Ph runs from 8.4 to 7.8.

This report claims a drop of Ph from .4 to .6 of Ph. This seems to be , maybe on the fringes of cause and effect.

This can all be googled but you have to get into page 3,4,5 to start finding research that was'nt influenced by grant money.

[phantom power]

5. That's pretty significant.

Oceans are big. Even a "small" change in pH requires a significant cause of some kind.

And, pH is a logarithmic scale, like the richter scale. So a change of 0.4 is equivalent to a factor 2.5 change.

[magnet180]

7. I understand the logarithmic

nature of pH. What I am saying is that without a good base it is impossible to to say if pH's are in fact being affected. To say a .6 change has taken place and the find that the oceans vary .4 to.6 is suspect.

This reminds me of ACID RAIN that attacked the eastern US and was the doom of all waters for more than a 100 years. Seems like 20 years after ther prediction of doom the waters in th NE USA are fine today

[enki23]

12. it's even more significant when you consider the whole story

as if we even knew the whole story in all its detail...

anyway, oceans *are* big. obviously, they're also have a very complex calcium carbonate buffer system. that's complicated by the fact that they contain living organisms, which form calcium carbonate shells, and a sediment interface at which both burial and resuspension are possible. but the time scales for all these processes vary, of course, and the processes all feed back into each other, and...

in any case, it's true that many marine organisms are *quite* sensitive to even small changes in pH. "ocean" is a really broad category. the fact that "ocean pH" varies somewhat from place to place doesn't mean that it generally varies much, in most places, over time.

[DrWeird]

6. research that wasn't influenced by grant money?

As opposed to?

[snowFLAKE]

8. IIRC, You were heavily involved in a thread about BHT

And it's supposed Anti-Viral effects via some kind of poorly defined Acid-Base effect.

I submit that as an example of research that wasn't influenced by Grant Money (OTOH, if it was influenced by Grant Money I'm mighty tempted to contact the Granting Agency myself to get in on the Pork since their standards for Awards do not appear to be all that high).

[DrWeird]

10. I didn't see any research in that thread.

Just what some nutter read off the internet.

Now if you're saying that "science that isn't influenced by grant money" is just a moniker for crap science, that I understand.

[snowFLAKE]

11. I suppose I didn't make my point clearly

That being:

No Grant Money = Absolute Crap

Grant Money = Better be absolutely sure You Get It Correct (or your next application is unlikely to be funded).

Which is probably exactly your point. But having spent two hours of my life (I'll never get back) reading that BHT thread, I was just trying to get some mileage outta it by regurgitating the memory thereof. EEEEHH, whatever.

[Boomer]

9. The effects could be even more catastrophic

While wandering through various research papers on mass extinctions, I found the following (boldface added):

http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/education/events/cowen2a.html

In 1996 Henk Visscher and his colleagues reported extreme abundances of fossil fungal cells in land sediments at the P-Tr boundary. There are hints that the fungi-enriched "layer" is the record of a single, world-wide crisis, with the fungi breaking down massive amounts of vegetation that had been catastrophically killed (there were no termites yet). Such a fungal layer is unique in the geological record of the past 500 m.y. The best evidence we have suggests that there were major extinctions among gymnosperms, especially in Europe, and among the coal-generating floras of the Southern Hemisphere. The vegetation of the early Triassic in Europe looks "weedy," that is, invasive of open habitats.

Andrew Knoll and his colleagues have suggested that the extinction was caused by a catastrophic overturn of an ocean supersaturated in carbon dioxide. This would result in tremendous, close to instantaneous, degassing that would roll a cloud of (dense) carbon dioxide over the ocean surface and low-lying coastal areas. An analog might be the recent catastrophic degassing of Lake Nyos, in the Cameroon, where hundreds of people were killed as carbon dioxide degassed from a volcanic lake and cascaded down valleys nearby. The difference is that the proposed P-Tr disaster was global.

In this scenario, the carbon dioxide build-up results from the global geography that included the gigantic ocean Panthalassa. Knoll and colleagues speculated that the abnormal ocean circulation in Panthalassa did not include enough downward transport of oxygenated surface water to keep the deep water oxygenated. With normal respiration and decay of dead organisms, the deep water evolved into an anoxic mass loaded with dissolved carbon dioxide, methane, and hydrogen sulfide. Carbon continued to fall to the sea floor from normal surface productivity, but it was deposited and buried because there was no dissolved oxygen to oxidize it. As carbon dioxide levels fell in the atmosphere, the earth and the surface ocean cooled. Finally, the surface waters became dense enough to sink, triggering a catastrophe as the CO2-saturated deep waters were brought up to the surface, degassing violently. The event would trigger a greenhouse heating and a major climatic warming.

From:
Tracking the Course of Evolution
EXTINCTION
by Richard Cowen

http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/education/events/cowen1a.html