Seattle Times: Broad stretch of Pacific ocean confirmed to be more acid as CO2 soaks in
A University of South Florida team published this week what may be the first sign at the scale of an entire ocean basin that sea water acidity is measurably increasing due to higher levels of carbon dioxide. And almost nobody wrote it up.
The exception in view to the Tracker and among traditional media is the Seattle Times, where Sandi Doughton got it in Wednesday’s edition. The news, from a team at the University of South Florida with participation by Seattle-area scientists, has its results in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. Data are from water samples gathered (including from the vessel pictured, UWash’s R/V Thomas G. Thompson) from waters between Hawaii and Alaska in 1991 and again three years ago. They report finding that, when the logarithmic pH scale is converted to a linear measure, acidity in the top 300 feet of ocean has risen about 6 percent.
Doughton puts the measurements in context with local changes in acidity in the Pacific Northwest, and speculation that if it goes on, many marine ecosystems such as coral reefs and plankton populations could be radically changed.
Deepest waters, they report, appear not to have changed – a confirmation that the shift is most likely due to chemical changes arising from interaction with the atmosphere. Chances seem high we will be reading a good deal more about this and similar studies.
Grist for the Mill: Univ. S. Florida Press Release ;
- Charlie Petit
