Ocean Acidification and Corals

http://www.publish.csiro.au/?act=view_file&file_id=MF99078.pdf
Climate change, coral bleaching and the future of the world™s coral reefs
Ove Hoegh-Guldberg
There you go Tim.

Coral reefs in the Ordovician were of a 100% different composition, rugose corals, which are extinct. Modern corals (scleractinians) did not evolve until hundreds of millions of years later. They are not comparable in any way. Please get your facts straight before posting this nonsense.

“Oceans May Soon Be More Corrosive Than When The Dinosaurs Died”

The last time the oceans endured such a drastic change in chemistry was 65 million years ago, at about the same time the dinosaurs went extinct. Though researchers do not yet know exactly what caused this ancient acidification,

The Chicxulub meteor must have been made of dry ice.

Oops!
Link to the last my post.
http://tinyurl.com/c55ta7

“GLOBAL WARMING, FISH, AND SUNSPOTS””
There are cycles in the ocean, and like climate above the water that below the water is determined in part by the sun.
The warmeres don’t take those cycles into account, and hence misinterpret changes in things like fish population in a given area to “overfishing” when the fish have just moved temporarily.
Some sanity in the literature, this on in “Nature” in 2001,

Ecosystems: Reef corals bleach to survive change
Andrew C. Baker1
Top of page
Abstract
The bleaching of coral reefs, in which symbiotic algae are lost from reef-building invertebrates, is usually considered to be a drastic and damaging response to adverse environmental conditions1, 2. Here I report results from transplant experiments involving different combinations of coral host and algal symbiont that support an alternative view, in which bleaching offers a high-risk ecological opportunity for reef corals to rid themselves rapidly of suboptimal algae and to acquire new partners. This strategy could be an advantage to coral reefs that face increasingly frequent and severe episodes of mass bleaching as a result of projected climate chang

The BBC reports on the resilience of coral…

Coral springs back from tsunami
Scientists have reported a rapid recovery in some of the coral reefs that were damaged by the Indian Ocean tsunami four years ago.
It had been feared that some of the reefs off the coast of Indonesia could take a decade to recover.
The New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) found evidence of rapid growth of young corals in badly-hit areas.

Funny, isn’t it, how those scientists who tell us they know everything keep getting blind-sided by reality.

Eric (07:35:24), from Real Climate:
“The equilibrium reaction for CO2 chemistry in seawater that most cogently captures its behavior is
CO2 + CO32- + H2O == 2 HCO3-
[…]
It works out in the end that CO2 and CO32- are very nearly inversely related to each other, as if CO2 times CO32- equaled a constant. “

I don’t think so. From a simple inorganic chemistry standpoint, here’s what happens when CO2 interacts with H2O in the presense of Ca:
CO2 + H20 = H2CO3 = H + HCO3
HCO3 = H + CO3
CO3 + Ca = CaCO3
So right at the beginning, there is no obvious way that adding more CO2 to the H2O will decrease CO3, despite what RC thinks is a “most cogent” equation.
Otoh, if there is a way, then RC should show the equations, etc., not simply summarize/make pronouncements as per its “most cogent” offering.
“Most cogent” is not a term from inorganic chemistry, where words have been replaced by equations for a reason. Chemical symbols and quantitative reactions replace the inferior qualitative words.

Steven,
I know you are not that bright, but surely you can understand that organisms which are entire family levels apart, would respond to things like ph in a different manner? Do you really think that all ocean organisms process calcium carbonate in the exact same way? The truth is; the ability to secrete calcium carbonate is a convergent feature, it evolved many many times, as an adaptation to living in an ocean full of dissolved Ca ions. Each time it evolved slightly different, which is why corals are very sensitive to ph, while other CaCo3 secreting organisms react differently. Your article shows a complete lack of understanding about how this process works. You should be ashamed of yourself.

Richard Sharpe (08:42:16) :
Bill D is still at it:
Richard:
My point is that conditions in Australia and accross the tropics are hot enough to kill off corals. I don’t see why it is necessary that one be concerned about the cause of the warm water, only that it’s warm enough now to threaten corals. The article that I quoted noted that the sea surface temperature in 1998 was the highest recorded until that time in the 95 year record of thermometer data. I think that it’s important to know that corals are now theatened by the recent or current conditions. If the oceans cool during the next decades they should be ok, as long as acidification does not increase.

Richard Sharpe–
It will be interesting to learn whether the record hot weather in Australia during the past month will heat the ocean enough to cause further coral bleaching and death. Surely we can study the effect of warm temperature even if we are unsure about the cause or causes. I thought that the topic of this posting was about the effect of ocean acidification and warm temperatures on corals? Scientists studying these problems may have their concerns about the local or global climate, but one does not need to know any about causes to gather lab and field data about effects of these factors on coral survival and growth.

MartinGAtkins (09:31:46) :

“Oceans May Soon Be More Corrosive Than When The Dinosaurs Died”
The last time the oceans endured such a drastic change in chemistry was 65 million years ago, at about the same time the dinosaurs went extinct. Though researchers do not yet know exactly what caused this ancient acidification,
The Chicxulub meteor must have been made of dry ice.

You’re not far off Martin!
There is uncertainty over whether the Chicxulub impact made much of an impact on the end-Cretaceous extinction/global warming/ocean anoxia/acidification. The evidence indicates that it predates the K/T boundary event by around 300,000 years.
However there is better evidence for rising CO2 cocentrations during a long, long period resulting from the massive prolonged tectonic events that gave rise to the Deccan Traps in what is now India. This seems to have been supplemented by a massive rapid rise of CO2, quite possibly due to the K/T boundary impact that blasted into carbonate-rich deposits and vapourised humungous amounts of carbonate back into CO2. So not quite “dry ice”….but still a very solid source of massive amounts of CO2.
e.g.
Beerling DJ et al. (2002) An atmospheric pCO(2) reconstruction across the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary from leaf megafossils Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 99 (12): 7836-7840
This group determined CO2 concentrations (plant stomatal pore proxies) right through the K/T boundary (KTB) event and concluded:
…..Our record shows stable Late Cretaceous/ Early Tertiary background pCO(2) levels of 350-500 ppm by volume, but with a marked increase to at least 2,300 ppm by volume within 10,000 years of the KTB. Numerical simulations with a global biogeochemical carbon cycle model indicate that CO2 outgassing during the eruption of the Deccan Trap basalts fails to fully account for the inferred pCO(2) increase. Instead, we calculate that the postboundary pCO(2) rise is most consistent with the instantaneous transfer of approximate to 4,600 Gt C from the lithic to the atmospheric reservoir by a large extraterrestrial bolide impact. A resultant climatic forcing of +12 W(.)m(-2) would have been sufficient to warm the Earth’s surface by approximate to7.5degreesC, in the absence of counter forcing by sulfate aerosols. This finding reinforces previous evidence for major climatic warming after the KTB impact and implies that severe and abrupt global warming during the earliest Paleocene was an important factor in biotic extinction at the KTB.”
In general many of the major extinction events in the deep past are associated with massive and prelonged tectonic events resulting in enhanced greenhouse warming, ocean anoxia (reduced pH…reduced oxygen). In fact the end-Cretaceous extinction is still not fully-defined due to the problem of dating of the Chicxulub impact (it was too early), the absence of a crater that properly coincides with the K/T boundary, and the relative contributions of tectonics (Deccan Traps) and impacts in the rather horrible events 65 million years ago…
…mind you, as mammal descendants of the plucky survivors, we came out of it rather well…

MUGGED BY REALITY
Corals Flourish at ”Nuked” Atoll

“I didn’t know what to expect, some kind of moonscape perhaps. But it was incredible, huge matrices of branching Porites coral had established, creating thriving coral reef habitat,” Zoe Richards, from Australia’s James Cook University, said of the trip to the atoll in the South Pacific.

Scientists Stunned By Coral Growth At Bikini Atoll

Bikini Atoll was the site of nearly two dozen nuclear tests from 1948 until 1958. The recent finding of extravagant coral growths have stunned the scientists who recently dove at Bravo Crater.

Another scare fades – Warming does not kill coral

The Great Barrier Reef is far more resilient to rising water temperatures than scientists feared, with less than 1 per cent of its coral affected by bleaching after the hot summer.