The world’s marine ecosystems risk being severely damaged by ocean acidification unless there are dramatic cuts in CO2 emissions, warn scientists.
The researchers warn that ocean acidification, which they refer to as “the other CO2 problem”, could make most regions of the ocean inhospitable to coral reefs by 2050, if atmospheric CO2 levels continue to increase.
This does indeed sound alarming, until you consider that corals became common in the oceans during the Ordovician Era – nearly 500 million years ago – when atmospheric CO2 levels were about 10X greater than they are today. (One might also note in the graph below that there was an ice age during the late Ordovician and early Silurian with CO2 levels 10X higher than current levels, and the correlation between CO2 and temperature is essentially nil throughout the Phanerozoic.)
Perhaps corals are not so tough as they used to be? In 1954, the US detonated the world’s largest nuclear weapon at Bikini Island in the South Pacific. The bomb was equivalent to 30 billion pounds of TNT, vapourised three islands, and raised water temperatures to 55,000 degrees. Yet half a century of rising CO2 later, the corals at Bikini are thriving. Another drop in pH of 0.075 will likely have less impact on the corals than a thermonuclear blast. The corals might even survive a rise in ocean temperatures of half a degree, since they flourished at times when the earth’s temperature was 10C higher than the present.
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Simon Evans (10:20:44) :
“I’ve added some bold! Besides which it’s rather obvious, isn’t it, that CO2-rich waters upwelling will increase the acidification pressure at surface levels and decrease the exposure of CO2 to the sea floor carbon buffer? How on earth is the observation of ENSO behaviiour supposed to answer the point that ocean floor buffering is globally a very slow process whilst near-surface CO2 absorption is developing rapidly?”
Overlooked your response sorry.
Here is a better description
“Phytoplankton are the base of the marine food chain, providing food for little sea animals called zooplankton, which in turn feed fish and other creatures. Any change in phytoplankton numbers alters the ocean food chain.
The computer model showed that during El Niño periods, warm waters from the Western Pacific Ocean spread out over much of the ocean basin as upwelling weakens in the Eastern Pacific Ocean. Upwelling brings cool, nutrient-rich water from the deep ocean up to the surface. When the upwelling is weakened, there are less phytoplankton, making food more scarce for zooplankton that eat the ocean plants.
During La Niña conditions as in 1998, the opposite effect occurs as the easterly trade winds pick up and upwelling intensifies bringing nutrients like iron to the surface waters, which increases phytoplankton growth. Sometimes, the growth can take place quickly, developing into what scientists call phytoplankton “blooms.”
In a study published in the January 2005 issue of Geophysical Research Letters, Wendy Wang and colleagues at the University of Maryland Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center, College Park, Md., found that changes in phytoplankton amounts due to El Niño and La Niña not only affect the food chain, but also influence Earth’s climate.”
http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/lookingatearth/plankton_elnino.html
What we are observing is not only the perturbation of the photic region in a local event,this also occurs globally eg in the arctic and antarctic and in semi enclosed basins.
First let us observe a natural law. Living organisms operate in what is described as far from equilibrium.
eg in “Theoretical Biology” E. Bauer confidently stated that biology was not applied physics or chemistry. He also stated that “all special laws, which would be revealed in certain fields of biology would display the general laws of motion, appropriate to living matter” [4, p.8]. The urgent problem of theoretical biology was, according to E. Bauer, the development of general laws of motion for living matter.
“Only living systems never reach equilibrium, for they constantly work against stability” [4, p.43]. According to Bauer, the source of free energy(or” the work of structuring forces” and “structural energy” are the synonyms) is the nonequilibrium of molecular structure of living matter
What is the source of the nonequilibrium of “living matter”? Firstly it is the activation of molecules of food caused by levelling processes. Energy of these molecules maintains nonequilibrium (here the molecules of living matter in “active, deformed state” are considered [4, p.127]. However, the unavoidable result of metabolism is, according to E. Bauer, the lowering of the potential of free energy of nonequilibrium. “The more intensive metabolism is, the higher rates of the free energy depletion are. This free energy of living matter exists because of the deformed nonequilibrium structure of its molecules” [4, p.129]. “During assimilation the structural energy of a system can be used. This energy is necessary for the reconstruction of nonliving substance” [4, p.144].The total amount of energy that can be assimilated is limited. This amount of energy is species-specific parameter of organism (Rubner constant) (see [4, p.131; 37] and is “proportional to the free energy of an ovicell” [4, p.130].
This means that the problem of the source of living matter’s nonequilibrium cannot be reduced to the possibility of nonequilibrium’s replenishment with free energy of food. Another source of nonequilibrium is required. The utilization of this source should regulate the organism’s ability to make up for free energy losses with food. Concerning deeper nonequilibrium one can propose several possibilities of its origination in organism. They might be the following:
– the law of nonincrease (or conservation) of structural energy and transfer of it from generation to generation;
– the possibility of external replenishment of structural energy during the origination or fertilization of the ovicell in addition to an explanation of Bauer’s theory, according to which fetal cells, possessing maximum initial potential, originate due to dying or, in other words, dissimilation of the body tissues” [4, p. 144].
– to reject the idea of the impossibility of structural energy replenishment during the life period, and then to find the ways of such replenishment, for instance, the mechanism of structural energy assimilation by autotrophs and its farther spreading in the biosphere through the food chains.
In the second and third proposals, and in other cases, allowing the structural energy replenishment, the question about the sources of such replenishment remains.
When considering the problem of understanding the stable nonequilibrium principle, another problem arises, that is the search for the sources of nonequilibrium. This problem is connected with time, its flow and becoming. One of the possible hypotheses dealing with this problem’s consideration consists of the substantial time construction [28; 29].
In modeling of biological systems that oscillate from state to state seemingly random in appearance, are actually showing self organization of the ecologic community to variation of resource and both evolution and devolution.
Yakushev, E.V. and Mikhailovsky, G.E., 1995. found biological attenuation (modulation)of ph levels during phytoplankton blooms.
The dramatic increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations observed during the past decades can be associated with the natural climatic oscillations or/and with anthropogenic influence. Concern about the potential role of CO2 as a “greenhouse gas” had led to necessity of investigation of this element global biogeochemical cycle peculiarities. The oceans play an important role in this cycle, containing large reservoirs of dissolved inorganic carbon as gaseous CO2(g), bicarbonate (HCO3-) and carbonate (CO32-) ions. Because of it, the ocean ultimately determines the atmosphere’s CO2 content (Siegenthaler, Sarmiento, 1993). Information about the CO2 system behavior can be obtained by investigations of the processes which affect the carbonate system parameters distribution and variability.
One of the most interesting aspect of this problem is the role of marine biota. When we speak about this, we consider the aggregation of gaseous CO2 into particulate organic carbon (POC), which can be transported into the deeper layers, sedimented on the bottom and thereby excluded from the global cycle and also of the POC mineralization and respiration processes (so-called “soft tissue pump” (Gruber et al, 1996) . However during the phytoplankton bloom the decrease of CO2 is accompanied by disbalance of the system which can initialize the activity of the other “pumps”: (“solubility pump” – ocean-atmosphere CO2 exchange, and “carbonate pump” – and formation dissolution of calcium carbonates).
During the bloom the consummation of gaseous CO2 by phytoplankton leads to the disbalance of the carbonate system equilibrium. This results in increased pH values and therefore in changes in the carbonate system balance toward increases in carbonates and additional decreases in gaseous CO2. In other words, during the bloom the upper layer gaseous carbon dioxide decreases for two reasons – consummation of the organic matter synthesis and transformation from gaseous CO2 to CO3, initiated by pH changes.
In this case during the bloom period one can observe decrease of TCO2 and dissolved CO2 while the value of carbonate alkalinity (AlkC) remains constant to fulfill the sea water electricity neutrality equation (Millero, 1995, Dickson, 1992).
eg http://i255.photobucket.com/albums/hh133/mataraka/Image62.gif
The ocean is not an empty “beaker” 65% of the biosphere lives in or under the ocean.