Daily Science Dose

A Woods Hole grad student, now working at the University of Southern Florida’s Mann Lab for Marine Sensory Biology, has released the finding from a study he conducted on marine mammal brains, and the news is not good. It seems that human’s propensity to use the oceans as a dumping ground (as well as our ineptitude in realizing that dangerous chemicals don’t just go away when we no longer see them) has resulted in bio-accumulation of some nasty substances in marine mammals.

Yes, again with the flame retardants…

Eric Montie went to work with Environment Canada to “learn the painstaking techniques required to extract and to quantify more than 170 different pollutants and their metabolites.” He brought back the methods to Woods Hole and started analyzing the brains of 11 whales and dolphins and a grey seal. The animals came from around the Cape Cod area, and darned if you didn’t guess, some not-so-nice chemicals were present in the cerebrospinal fluid as well as the grey matter.

And yes, our dear friends DDT, an overly effective pesticide that has been banned around the world, but doesn’t seem to want to go away; PBDEs, or flame retardants which are only know being scrutinzed despite their ubiquity; and PCBs, again a banned chemical family that just doesn’t go away have all been found in the marine mammalian brain studied by Montie. In fact, the levels of PCBs in the seal were in the parts per million, which may seem small, but according to Montie, “you rarely find parts per million levels of anything in the brain.”

So what’s the big deal? Well, PCBs kind of trick a body into thinking that they are thyroid hormones and instead of healthy and needed thyroid hormones, the body gets PCBs. That can lead to all sorts of neurological issues and problems when it comes to brain development and can disrupt the sensory functions of mammals like dolphins, seals and whales that really depend on their sense of hearing to live.

Just how these chemicals might impact marine mammal health is something Montie plans to pursue. This summer, Montie, [David] Mann [the man behind the aforementioned Mann Lab], and Dr. Mandy Cook (from Portland University) will partner with scientists from NOAA to test the hearing in dolphins living near a Superfund site in Georgia and compare it to dolphins from locations where ambient concentrations of pollutants are significantly lower. Montie is also working with Frances Gulland, director of the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito, CA, to examine how California sea lions’s exposure to PCBs may increase their sensitivity to domoic acid, a naturally produced marine neurotoxin associated with “red tides.” –WHOI news release

Great…

Related: Pelicans Dropping From Sky for Reasons Unknown

marine biology, marine science, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, Woods Hole, Eric Montie, Environment Canada, University of Southern Florida, David Mann, seals, whales, dolphins, brains, chemicals, DDT, PCB, PBDE, flame retardants, pesticides, cerebrospinal fluid, contaminants, ocean, pollution, banned substances, bio-accumulation, thyroid, hormones, senses, hearing, health, mammals, dumping

It finally happened. A reputable scientist from a top organization has put it out there, and it was a team of scientists from probably the top organization in the US for this kind of work.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has a team of scientists that just published a new study basically saying that once carbon levels reach a certain peak, there will be some dire consequences. Ok, got that. But the problem is that once a peak is reached, say 450 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmospehere (we are currently at 385 ppm), there will be no going back. Alright, “no going back” is a bit extreme, but what I mean is that once a certain threshold is crossed, and we most likely have already passed one of those thresholds, certain permanent* changes will be inevitable whether or not we cut all carbon emissions once past certain thresholds.

*Please be aware that nothing on this planet is permanent. I use this word to explain certain long-long-term weather and climate patterns that will change and become seemingly “permanent.”

The study looks at certain thresholds for carbon dioxide concentrations in our atmosphere: 450, 600, and even up to 1000 ppm. The research finds that once a threshold is reached and certain climatic changes are taking place, it would be more than one thousand years before any drastic cuts in carbon emissions would mitigate the situation.

“Our study convinced us that current choices regarding carbon dioxide emissions will have legacies that will irreversibly change the planet,” said [Susan]Solomon [NOAA senior scientist], who is based at NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo.

“It has long been known that some of the carbon dioxide emitted by human activities stays in the atmosphere for thousands of years,” Solomon said. “But the new study advances the understanding of how this affects the climate system.”

The study examines the consequences of allowing CO2 to build up to several different peak levels beyond present-day concentrations of 385 parts per million and then completely halting the emissions after the peak.

The authors found that the scientific evidence is strong enough to quantify some irreversible climate impacts, including rainfall changes in certain key regions, and global sea level rise.

If CO2 is allowed to peak at 450-600 parts per million, the results would include persistent decreases in dry-season rainfall that are comparable to the 1930s North American Dust Bowl in zones including southern Europe, northern Africa, southwestern North America, southern Africa and western Australia.

The study notes that decreases in rainfall that last not just for a few decades but over centuries are expected to have a range of impacts that differ by region. Such regional impacts include decreasing human water supplies, increased fire frequency, ecosystem change and expanded deserts. — SPX via TerraDaily

Not all the peaks showed dire climatic changes, but they all showed substantial climate changes, and the length of those changes were made longer by the heat-transfer of the ocean, which is standard physics and cannot be stopped. In fact, a big problem that this study exposes is that warmer water takes up more space, simple by the physics of the water molecules. Heat them and they expand. Water will expand.

And if water is going to expand due to higher temperatures, then water levels will rise, whether or not glaciers and ice caps melt. The NOAA team found that base water rise, from just the expansion of the ocean water itself, will account for up to 3 feet in sea level rise.

So, in closing, this new study says, we are screwed.

carbon dioxide, study, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, water, sea levels, climate change, global warming, melt, climate , climate patterns

You may have heard something along the lines of pharmaceuticals showing up in our water supply, as so many of us are taking more than an aspirin and still calling our doctors for more. Well, the good news is that yes, pharmaceuticals are showing up in water and in great concentrations in what is removed from our water — sewage sludge. The bad news is that there is a lot more stuff in that sewage sludge than just antidepressants.

Biosolids and You

As the EPA says, “The terms sewage sludge and biosolids are used by EPA interchangeably, but others often use the term biosolids to describe sewage sludge that has had additional processing for land application.” So in this case, biosolids are solid and biological in origin, that is it comes from humans and animals. These biosolids are often converted to fertilizers as our poo and pee have lots of nitrogen and other beneficial nutrients. That’s why manure is used in organic farming, after all. Well, sometimes that manure is yours.

Or was yours, rather.

What the report says is that there is a whole lotta sh*t in our sewage sludge, and I’m not talking feces here. The EPA looked at samples from 74 water treatment plants in 35 states, and here’s what they were looking for in all that sludge.

four anions (nitrite/nitrate, fluoride, water-extractable phosphorus)

28 metals

four polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons

two semi-volatiles

11 flame retardants

72 pharmaceuticals

25 steroids and hormones

Many of the 145 chemicals tested for were present nationwide. Biosolids from all of the 74 large treatment plants surveyed contained the same 27 metals, but only zinc, molybdenum, and nickel exceeded standards for application to fields. Almost all of the 11 flame retardants on the list were present in every sample. Twelve of the 72 pharmaceuticals were similarly ubiquitous.

Two of the most common drugs were the antibiotics triclocarban and ciprofloxacin. Although the average concentrations were similar to those in previous small-scale studies, several samples harbored up to 440 parts per million of triclocarban, which is added to antimicrobial soap and other personal care products. That’s almost 10 times higher than ever reported in biosolids and “astonishingly high,” Halden says. One question is whether the antibiotics harm soil microbes, or aquatic life if enough leaches into streams, Halden says. “We really don’t have the answer.” –Science

Remember how some people warned everybody about using antibacterial soaps because they would breed super germs? Seems like that was the least of our worries. If sewage sludge continues to accumulate antibiotics, and if that sewage were processed through into fertilizer, the antibiotics could end up creating major issues in agricultural soils which depend on beneficial microbes and bacteria to break down nutrients for crops.

And that’s just the downside to antibiotics…we haven’t even gotten into the other stuff yet.

EPA, sewage sludge, sewage, fertilizer, crops, soil, water, water treatment, antibiotics, antidepressants, water supply, waste, human, agriculture, chemicals, organic farming

Setting: Kruger National Park Wildlife Reserve, South Africa along the Mozambique border

Three dead crocodiles were found within the park. The victims suffered a painful death. The fat within their bodies hardened into a rubber-like state. The victims were rendered powerless to move. The crocodiles could not move to eat or drink, and soon they died of either starvation, thirst or exposure.

That was last May. Now, over 170 crocodiles have perished in much the same way within Kruger National Park, a showcase national park that hosts a good number of top predators like lions and leopards in addition to other large mammals like elephants, hippos and rhinos.

The science has come back on what is killing these huge crocs, the Nile variety of crocodile. Pansteatitis or “Yellow Fat Disease” is not a pretty disease and it affects other animals as well as the crocodiles. Domestic cats have been found to suffer from the disease, and also birds and fresh water turtles may become afflicted with this mysterious disease.

The condition attacks fat stores, depleting anti-oxidants and inflaming the fat in a process that scientists believe is very painful.

“There was a big concern that other species could be affected,” Jan Myburgh, veterinarian specialising in toxicology, told AFP.

The chief worry was for lions — seen feeding on the dead crocodiles — and other cat species, based on the susceptibility of domestic cats, but no dead or sick felines have been found, he said.– TerraDaily

The real problem is that no one can figure out how or why this disease strikes. Most of the scientists working on the case (as well as similar cases over the years) are pointing to strained river resources in the area. The rivers within the Park include the Olifants, the Timbavati, and the Sabie.

The Kruger deaths occurred in a remote gorge which has faced increased siltation from a dam in neighbouring Mozambique, and is fed by one of South Africa’s hardest working rivers which supports various heavy industries.

Clues are now being sought by a multi-pronged programme looking at the entire river system to get a better understanding of the cause and effect links around the deaths.

So, this could be any number of reasons that these Nile crocodiles, which can grow up to 5 meters or 15 feet long and weigh up to 500 pounds, are dying off in such a disturbing way. Not enough fresh water, warmer water, polluted water, diseases spreading in from upriver, a decline in the general health of big carnivores or scavengers willing to eat their own kind.

Disturbing all the same.

crocodiles, South Africa, Kruger National Park, disease, yellow fat disease, pansteatitis, rubber, muscle, health, wildlife, predators, Africa, Mozambique, rivers, water resources

Did you know that the present time is already considered one of the great mass extinctions? Humans seem to be the major culprit in this, the Holocene extinction event, but scientists have recently began surmising that a similar extinction 251 million years ago was caused by the same thing. But with no humans around 251 million years ago, what is it that I am talking about — yep, carbon dioxide.

The Christian Science Monitor published an article this last week detailing the current hypotheses of a team of researchers and scientists from multiple disciplines.

Now scientists are rethinking another of earth’s great die-offs. The end-Permian extinction 251 million years ago was the worst of earth’s five mass extinctions. Ninety percent of all marine life and 70 percent of terrestrial life disappeared. It took five million years, perhaps more, for the biosphere to recover.

But while the die-off was uniquely devastating, evidence of a single cataclysmic event, like an asteroid strike, hasn’t been found in the geological record. Scientists now suspect that “the mother of all mass extinctions” was of Earth’s own making. And the more they learn about it, the more parallels they see to today’s world: A bout of greenhouse-gas-induced global warming, much like today’s, set off a chain of events that culminated in oxygen-depleted oceans exhaling poison gas.

It seems that increased volcanic activity started burning through coal beds, releasing enormous amounts of carbon dioxide — something we humans are doing, we are like little volcanoes, I guess. The Earth’s population at the time was already stressing the system, and when the extra CO2 entered the atmosphere, it lead to warmer seas (sounds familiar). The warmer seas lead to increased weathering and erosion, which washed nutrients into the oceans, thus leading to algae blooms (again, familiar). When the algae dies, the decomposition process requires oxygen, effectively starving the water of oxygen. When water does not have enough oxygen, many organisms cannot live in that water, except for anaerobic organisms that breathe in sulfates and give off hydrogen sulfide as exhalation. Hydrogen sulfide is poisonous to us oxygen-loving organisms.

And the lessons for today? At the Permian boundary, “you’re in a state of gradual warming, then as you approach that boundary, the warming in­­creases dramatically,” says Jeff Kiehl, a senior scientist at the Na­­­tion­­­al Center for Atmospheric Re­­search in Boulder, Colo. “It wasn’t a linear warming.” Says Professor Kump: “This shows us what could happen if we push the system too hard…. We don’t know where the intermediate thresholds are.”

We’re still some way from the atmospheric CO2 levels hypothesized at the end-Permian extinction – which were perhaps 10 times preindustrial levels, or 2,800 ppm. Yet, according the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, if trends continue we’re still approaching 1,000 ppm of CO2 by 2100. That’s not Permian-extinction levels, but it would be the highest CO2 concentration in 80 million years, and a level at which both ocean anoxia and lesser extinctions have occurred.

This theory on what lead to the “great dying” at the transition between the Permian and Triassic periods (the extinction event is called the Permian-Triassic extinction event, appropriately enough) has been bouncing around for a while now, once scientists started questioning the evidence of the Killer Asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs. It seems that despite the asteroid’s impact and subsequent devastation, many big dinosaurs stuck around for quite some time afterward. When the asteroid impact theory gained popularity, some scientists felt that all of our many mass extinctions throughout Earth’s history were caused by otherworldly impacts, but not all the evidence added up.

Until fossil records started showing evidence of little sulfide-emitting organisms, and then scientists started looking at the Permian-Triassic more carefully.

From a Scientific American article from 2006:

But the biomarkers in the oceanic sediments from the latest part of the Permian, and from the latest Triassic rocks as well, yielded chemical evidence of an ocean-wide bloom of the H2S-consuming bacteria. Because these microbes can live only in an oxygen-free environment but need sunlight for their photosynthesis, their presence in strata representing shallow marine settings is itself a marker indicating that even the surface of the oceans at the end of the Permian was without oxygen but was enriched in H2S.

Also, the P-Tr event is marked by volcanic activity in Siberia, of all places, and only a couple of months ago, scientists discovered that large amounts of methane are leaking from the Siberia Seabed. Hmm, methane is a greenhouse gas that has 20 times the power to trap heat that carbon dioxide does, and if that “leak” continues, well, estimates that 50 percent of all species will go extinct in the next century may not be too far off the mark.

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You may have heard something about India and China and the threat of their current industrialization and how that industrialized pollution in the way of increased emissions of greenhouse gases will affect the world’s climate. It is true that this is and will be a huge problem for all of us, but another issue with industrialization is the more localized pollution that comes with it.

Image by Nicolle Rager Fuller, National Science Foundation

India and China are playing catch-up with the rest of the industrialized world. That is one of the Bush’s administrations sticky points when it comes to not signing on to the Kyoto Protocol for all these years. Why should the US and Europe bother to cut back on greenhouse gas emissions when China and India are just starting to pump millions of tons of carbon into the air (and water) via new yet inefficient coal-fired power plants? I know, the admin’s attitude is mind-boggling and childish, but I didn’t vote for him, so it’s not like I can apologize for him and his handlers here. Instead of the US perhaps leading the innovation and technological boom in green industries and then exporting that technology and equipment to India and China, both the US economy would be doing well and China and India could go “green.” But no matter, I don’t have the space here to ruminate on the topic today.

India and China are currently heavily reliant on coal (so is the US, if you care to know). The problem with coal is that it is very dirty in addition to releasing tons of carbon upon being burned. Coal creates “brown clouds,” that is localized pollution of tiny soot particles that collect and act like their own mini-greenhouse.

Last year, National Geographic News covered a new study on these brown clouds.

But the latest study suggests that aerosols can be responsible for regional warming. Specifically, the clouds of aerosols over India enhance atmospheric warming there by 50 percent.

“We found this brown cloud can cover the entire North Indian Ocean, an area the size of the continental United States,” said lead author Veerabhadran Ramanathan, a climate scientist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego.

The haze of brown clouds over the region can be up to two miles (three kilometers) thick, Ramanathan said.

And the haze touches the lower parts of the glaciers in the Himalaya mountain range, said study co-author David Winker, principal investigator of the CALIPSO satellite at NASA’s Langley Research Center.

This suggests that the brown clouds may be contributing to glacial melting in the Himalaya.

Now there are differences in aerosols. Some are light colored and some dark. It is the dark aerosols that are the contributors to these brown clouds.

Brown clouds contain dark aerosols such as soot that are released into the atmosphere by burning organic matter.

These particles absorb solar energy and then release it to the surrounding air as heat.

Natural forces such as forest fires can create soot, but so can human actions such as burning fossil fuels.

…

But unlike greenhouse gases, light and dark aerosols are not distributed uniformly throughout the globe, said Peter Pilewskie, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Colorado at Boulder who was not involved in the study.

Averaging the effects of aerosols worldwide masks regional processes that “we need to truly understand when we put all the pieces of the planet together,” Pilewskie said.

Why does this all matter? The Himalayan ice cap is vital to the survival of China, India, and all their neighbors. And this ice cap, a network of thousands and thousands of glaciers, is melting, and fast.

The 15,000 Himalayan glaciers that create the “Water Tower of Asia” — the largest block of fresh water outside the Polar Ice Caps — have been melting forever. But they are suddenly melting so fast that they are drying up. It will take decades, but at the rate the earth is warming, they may simply disappear.

“Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world,” the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned last year. “If the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate.”

If you are bothered by the “oil wars” we see today, just wait for the “water wars” of the future.

India, China, global warming, climate change, pollution, brown clouds, aerosols, greenhouse gases, industrialization, coal, power, energy, air pollution, soot, National Geographic, National Science Foundation

This is post is part of a series that is looking at the impending danger of tropical diseases moving into temperate areas. The cause of this migration is the actual movement or rather expansion of the tropics themselves, thanks to global warming and climate change.

Dengue Fever

Dengue fever is also spread by a mosquito, much like malaria. In dengue fever’s case it is the Aedes mosquito that transmits the four different strains of the flavivirus. For the most part, dengue is not super-serial, er, i mean super serious (accidental channeling of the South Park version of Al Gore, sorry), but can become serious in two ways. Dengue is more than capable of *ahem* going viral (goodness, I am full of mischief today), that is becoming an epidemic or even worse, a pendemic; or it may become a more dangerous case of Dengue Hemorrhagic Fever. The ‘hemorr-’ prefix is not usually a good one, referring to hemorraging blood.

Dengue symptoms include severe headaches, severe muscle and joint pain, and a red rash that can cover the entire body. Sometimes there can be gastrointestinal distress (I love that phrase) as well. If the fever gets bad enough, that is when the hemorraging starts, and finally you die. Ok, that was glib, but death does occur in about 5% of untreated cases, one percent for those who do receive proper medical care.

Dengue fever breaks out in most places, and is endemic to the United States, mostly in the South. Epidemics break out here and there in tropical countries every so often, being recorded as far back at the late 1700’s. And why the 1700’s? Because that’s when Europeans colonized the tropics, and our history is Euro-centric, obviously, because I will bet you dollars to doughnuts that dengue has been around a long, long time. No matter here as I am not letting myself continue on my diatribe about “history.” Moving on…

Dengue Fever breaks out enough to affect 50 to 100 million people around the world. Only a few hundred thousand get dengue hemorrhagic fever. Usually these cases happen in the tropics, or maybe among travelers that had visited tropical climates. However, the tropical bands that circle this planet between what had traditional been the two “Tropics” of Cancer and Capricorn are spreading north and south into sub-tropical regions and those subtropical regions are likewise spreading up into temperate zones. This may not seem like a big deal to you there in Minnesota, and will hopefully never be a big deal, but just think about how much hotter and wetter your summers have been in the last twenty years? Wetter and hotter means more mosquitoes. No, but seriously, it may not be a big deal for those of you living above the 35th parallel (or south of it in the Southern Hemisphere), but things only seem to be getting hotter…

I’ll break it down for you. If it doesn’t freeze in the winter, the terrori– mosquitoes win.

By the way, the Centers for Disease Control think that dengue is pretty dengue serious. Oh my, what is wrong with me today?

In 2005, dengue is the most important mosquito-borne viral disease affecting humans; its global distribution is comparable to that of malaria, and an estimated 2.5 billion people live in areas at risk for epidemic transmission (Figure 4). Each year, tens of millions of cases of DF occur and, depending on the year, up to hundreds of thousands of cases of DHF. The case-fatality rate of DHF in most countries is about 5%, but this can be reduced to less than 1% with proper treatment. Most fatal cases are among children and young adults.

Many more cases probably go unreported each year because surveillance in the United States is passive and relies on physicians to recognize the disease, inquire about the patient’s travel history, obtain proper diagnostic samples, and report the case. These data suggest that states in southern and southeastern United States, where Ae. aegypti is found, are at risk for dengue transmission and sporadic outbreaks.

Here’s Figure 4.

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You may remember years ago when SARS broke out and with it fears that this disease could spread with human hosts as they traveled across the globe? Well, it is true that diseases can spread through the human hosts in this age of trans-global travel, and if that happens, it can be dangerous. But something else is happening to spread diseases that just don’t exist everywhere.

Tropical diseases don’t usually show up in places like Europe and North America, but they are starting to, and this problem may get worse before it gets better.

At the heart of the problem is that it is the tropics themselves that are on the move, and with them come certain insect-borne diseases such as malaria and dengue fever.

I had written on tropical diseases moving into Europe back in January. And now, I have run across more bad news and this time it is coming from the World Health Organization. The Nobel-prize winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has already noted that more and more people will be afflicted by tropical diseases, and why? Global warming and climate change. The warmer parts of the world, where many lethal diseases thrive, are expanding their range into formerly temperate regions. And with milder winters, insects and other disease-carrying organisms are not killed off during winter months, and thus expanding their range every year.

A study published last December in Nature Geoscience reported that tropical zones are moving at a much faster rate than computer models had predicted.

Scientists have found that, during the past 25 years the equatorial region classified as climatologically tropical has expanded polewards by about 172 miles which has meant that a further 8.5 million sq miles of the Earth are now experiencing a tropical climate, compared to 1980.

The study was carried out by Dian Seidel of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Washington, her colleagues from the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, and the universities of Washington in Seattle and Utah in Salt Lake City.

They found that, during the past quarter-century, the area defined as tropical, based on a list of five recognised climatological criteria, has moved further north and south by about 2.5 degrees of latitude, or about 172 miles in total in both directions. That is greater than the predicted shift of 2 degrees by 2100 predicted under the “extreme scenario” envisaged by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. –The Independent

What is a “tropical” region? Of course, we think of palm trees and mai tais, but that is really not what we are talking about when we discuss tropical diseases. Tropical regions receive more sunlight than anywhere else. If you need a simple definition, you can use a globe and check out the area between the “Tropics” of Cancer and Capricorn. But scientifically-speaking, the tropics are wetter. Warmer air can hold more moisture, and the tropics have the hottest air thus the wettest air. As you move away from the tropics, air cools and thus the “sub-tropics” have less moisture in the air. Meanwhile, that moisture has fallen somewhere before hitting the sub-tropics. So not only is the air in the tropics wet, but there is an awful lot of precipitation in the tropics. That much water can create very inviting environments for such disease-carrying insects like the mosquito.

tropical diseases, tropics, disease, SARS, malaria, dengue fever, Europe, North American, Nature Geoscience, World Health Organization, Intergovernmental Panel and Climate Change, IPCC, nobel, global warming, climate change, mosquito, cancer, capricorn

If you pay attention to the news, and especially news on the state of the environment, you may have heard of something called “ocean acidification.” This is a very serious issue that is just starting to gain some attention from scientists. The ocean won’t become a bubbling cauldron of acid, steaming and fuming with potential pain and burning, but the water’s pH balance may shift toward the more acidic.

The oceans are well-known as a sequester of carbon dioxide. So much so that some have advocated that instead of bothering with cutting carbon emissions, we can just “sink” the carbon in the oceans. And it is true that this has been the Earth’s way of dealing with excess carbon and methane for eons, but lately, it seems that anthropogenic carbon (that means that the source is man-made) is too much for the ocean to take it in without throwing the whole system out of whack. When the ocean absorbs carbon dioxide, or CO2, water’s H2O binds with that CO2 and forms HCO3, and that, my friends, is carbonic acid.

Now, obviously, it would take a LOT of carbon dioxide to turn the seas acidic, or more accurately, less alkaline, as the ocean’s typical pH (potential Hydrogen) is 8.2, or at least was before the Industrial Revolution. And guess what we humans have pumped into the atmosphere — a LOT of carbon dioxide.

Do you ever wonder that perhaps fossil fuels were buried in the first place as “carbon sinks?” And we have simply released all that carbon that nature put under ground so many years ago…

I digress. The problem at hand is now that if the pH of the ocean becomes too acidic (less alkaline) too fast, many marine organisms will not be able to adapt quickly enough to survive. Any creature that builds a shell uses calcium carbonate and aragonite in order to do so. Carbonic acid corrodes the aragonite, and shell formation becomes difficult. Scientists have found that some snails that happen upon carbon vents in the Mediterranean are losing their shells, literally. The carbonic acid is dissolving the shells.

The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, you know, the Nobel-prize winning IPCC) has warned that pH may decrease 0.14 to 0.35 by 2100. This could mean that with the decrease of 0.1 experienced since the beginning of the Industrial Rev, we could see oceans of 7.8 pH. Shelled creatures will most likely not be able to keep up with that amount of change in pH, and when we lose the shelled organisms, such as some snails, we can lose a valuable food source for things we like to eat, like salmon. With the oceans already stressed, a decrease in pH may be more that they can handle.

ocean acidification, carbonic acid, pH, carbon sinks, climate change, IPCC, methane, calcium carbonate, shells, aragonite