THE ELECTRIC OCEAN ACID TEST
Parts of this essay first appeared in PlanetRestart.org.There are about 5,000 species of marine phytoplankton, and they work pretty much like land plants, using the process of photosynthesis to take in carbon dioxide and produce oxygen. In fact they produce about half of the total oxygen produced by all plant life.
Hmmm. These little guys eat tons of carbon dioxide and after their meal they politely burp out half of all the oxygen available at any given time. Gee, that sounds kind of important. You would think that the care and feeding of phytoplankton would be up near the top of mankind's to-do list. Well, think again.
The following is taken from a report recently published by International Union for the Conservation of Nature entitled Ocean Acidification: The Facts.
Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution 250 years ago, sea water acidity has increased by 30%. It should be noted that increasing sea water acidity lowers the ocean's natural 'basic' or 'alkaline' status and unnaturally forces the acidbase balance of sea water towards acid. ... Future projections show that by 2060, seawater acidity could have increased by 120%. To the best of our knowledge, the current rate of change is many times faster than anything previously experienced in the last 55 million years.
Many of the animals and plants in the ocean have calcium carbonate skeletons or shells. Some of them such as the microscopic plankton at the base of the food chain, the shellfish and molluscs used day-to-day in our diets ... secrete a form of calcium carbonate (aragonite) that will readily dissolve should the seas continue to become more acidic. A trend towards more acidic conditions will therefore reduce such species' ability to make their shells. We have taken such plants and animals for granted up to now, but ocean acidification may threaten their very existence.
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| Your Ocean | Your Ocean on Acid |
January 2, 2010
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