From the Carnegie Institution and Stanford University comes word of this paper in JGR.
Washington, D.C. — Coral reefs are extremely diverse ecosystems that support enormous biodiversity. But they are at risk. Carbon dioxide emissions are acidifying the ocean, threatening reefs and other marine organisms. New research led by Carnegie’s Kenneth Schneider analyzed the role of sea cucumbers in portions of the Great Barrier Reef and determined that their dietary process of dissolving calcium carbonate (CaCO3) from the surrounding reef accounts for about half of at the total nighttime dissolution for the reef. The work is published December 23 by the Journal of Geophysical Research.
Reefs are formed through the biological deposition of calcium carbonate (CaCO3). Many of the marine organisms living on and around a reef contribute to either its destruction or construction. Therefore it is crucial that the amount of calcium carbonate remain in balance. When this delicate balance is disrupted, the reef ceases to grow and its foundations can be weakened.
In order to fully understand a reef’s ability to deposit carbonate and grow, it is necessary to understand the roles that the various elements of sea life play in this process. This is especially important because increased atmospheric carbon dioxide is predicted to decrease the amount of carbonate available due to acidification.
The research group set out to examine the role that sea cucumbers play in the reef environment.
Schneider’s team included Carnegie’s Ken Caldeira, as well as Jacob Silverman, of the Israeli Limnology and Oceanography Institute; Maria Byrne and Erika Woolsey, both of the University of Sydney and the latter also from James Cook University; and Hampus Eriksson of Stockholm University.
They studied the growth and dissolution of One Tree Reef, which surrounds One Tree Island in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. Focusing on an area of the reef known as “DK13”, they found that sea cucumbers were abundant. They collected some of these sea cucumbers and placed them in aquaria to study the effect on sea water resulting from the sand and rubble transported through their gut system as part of their digestive process.
As part of another ongoing study in this area, the team found that the coral reef was dissolving at night. They found that sea cucumbers play a crucial part in this process. They live off the bits of organic matter in the carbonate sand and rubble that they ingest; in this process, their digestive systems produce acids that dissolve parts of these carbonate minerals. The dissolved carbonate minerals are then released into the surrounding environment. The researchers found that these lowly organisms might be responsible for half of the CaCO3 of the reef observed at night.
The burning of coal, oil, and gas releases CO2 into the atmosphere, which is later absorbed by the ocean, causing the ocean to acidify. Ocean acidification is expected to slow reef growth. With slower reef growth, the dissolution of CaCO3 within the guts of sea cucumbers is expected to become even more important to the reef CaCO3 budget.
“Even though the sea cucumbers dissolve CaCO3 on the reef, in a lagoon such as the one at One Tree Reef, where there is limited seawater exchange with the surrounding ocean, they can be important in recycling of nutrients to support primary productivity. They also increase sea water buffer capacity to partially offset ocean acidification effects, helping to maintain the overall health of the coral reef,” Schneider said. “Although sea cucumbers may play a part in reef dissolution, they are also an important part of an incredible marine environment.”
This research was supported by the Moore foundation. The authors thank the University of Sydney’s One Tree Island Research Station facility.
The Department of Global Ecology was established in 2002 to help build the scientific foundations for a sustainable future. The department is located on the campus of Stanford University, but is an independent research organization funded by the Carnegie Institution. Its scientists conduct basic research on a wide range of large-scale environmental issues, including climate change, ocean acidification, biological invasions, and changes in biodiversity.
The Carnegie Institution for Science (carnegiescience.edu) is a private, nonprofit organization headquartered in Washington, D.C., with six research departments throughout the U.S. Since its founding in 1902, the Carnegie Institution has been a pioneering force in basic scientific research. Carnegie scientists are leaders in plant biology, developmental biology, astronomy, materials science, global ecology, and Earth and planetary science.
So supposedly we know to a hundredth of a pH unit the impacts of changing CO2 but we don’t know whether or not the ocean are a sink or a source. How does that work?
Smokey says
And there is no empirical, testable measurement that shows ocean pH changing due to human emitted CO2. To even imply that is ‘Bad Science, bad, bad.’
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Depends on what kind of evidence you find acceptable. If you don’t want to accept it then I am sure you could come up with some quibble at every stage of the chain of evidence.
Let’s start with basic chemistry. We know the composition of sea water, we know the change in atmospheric CO2 concentration. Then it’s just a matter of calculating the change of pH using well known chemical laws. But I am sure that is not enough for you.
Then there are direct measurements of changes on sea water pH. But that won’t be enough for you either.
And then we can compare the results of calculation with measurement to see if they agree. But that won’t be enough either.
And so on…,
philincalifornia on December 26, 2011 at 3:40 pm said:
Rob Painting says:
December 26, 2011 at 2:10 pm
Could you please explain to this Ph.D. chemist how water at an alkaline pH moving slightly closer to neutrality causes it to become corrosive.
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That’s easy. It’s corrosive in the context of affecting the dissolution rate of calcium carbonate shell.
The language might be a bit dramatic but it’s clear what the meaning is.
A related factor that comes into this is the ability of biological organisms to lay down shell in an environment of reduced alkalinity. There is likely an energy cost for the organism. But this is not something I know anything about.
LazyTeenager says:
“There is a balancing act.”
There is no balancing act in nature- balance requires a steady state. There is only adaptation. The state of any eco-system (and there are many “stable states)” at any given time and place is simply one of an infinite numbers of potential emerged solutions operating within limits whose probability is a function of initial condition. The “Balance of Nature” is Disney. So tell me whats the right state in your opinion- lay me out all the creatures predators and grazers and tell me the correct assemblage that constitutes your balance? The balance you claim is a value judgement although a poorly defined one- it has nothing to do with Nature. I’ll make it easier how does this problem rank amongst all the other known threats to reefs? And why is this “potential threat” commanding so much of the research budget?
Here is a more important question with all the real and immediate problems reefs face why are we spending most of our money money on this? In the US we are now spending more money on a potential threat from CO2 to oysters as an example than we are on the known and devastating MSX, Dermo and Vibrio plagues. This is madness and demonstrates environmentalism doesn’t give a damn about the environment.
Pat Moffitt – are you unable to read the scientific paper I referred to?, or do you simply not understand it? There’s vast body of scientific literature on this topic, even if you are unaware of it. Check out the citations in the Kump paper for instance.
philincalifornia – you’re a PhD chemist? Seriously? Then you should understand that acidification refers to the process of adding hydrogen ions (hydronium in the case of seawater). It has nothing to do with a neutral pH.
Sure ocean ‘acidification’ sounds serious, but that’s because it is a serious threat to marine life, not that people will dissolve if they swim in the ocean.
LazyTeenager says:
“Let’s start with basic chemistry. We know the composition of sea water, we know the change in atmospheric CO2 concentration. Then it’s just a matter of calculating the change of pH using well known chemical laws. But I am sure that is not enough for you.”
Show me the calculations that can resolve a hundredth of a pH unit change. Make sure you add in all the primary production variables, upwelling events, temperature, wind, terrestrial organic acid inputs etc. I’ll wait.
Pat Moffitt – “we don’t know whether or not the ocean are a sink or a source. How does that work?
Where do you suppose half of our fossil fuel emissions vanish to? I don’t know the “we” you allude to, but science is pretty clear that almost half of our fossil fuel emissions to date have been absorbed by the oceans and resulted in the decrease of ocean pH. Google “Henry’s Law” for starters.
Where were Lazy Teenager and Rob Painting 35 years ago? They could have saved me so much time spend needlessly studying the sciences and grappling with the awesome complexity we see in eco-systems. Everything is caused by tiny changes in CO2. Who knew it was that simple?
I feel what Lyell must have felt when first hearing Louis Agassiz’s Plan of Creation- a description so beautiful in its simplicity that one could do nothing more than regret -it was not true.
Willis,
It’s best to take a Lewis acid-base view here (since neither CO2 nor CaCO3 have protons). A neutralization is where a base, with an electron pair available for sharing, joins with an acid that wants it. Producing an acid in aqueous solution generally involves pulling such a pair apart.
You can see this if you think about titration curves. Many are fairly anti-symmetric. If you started from near neutral and ran a titration backwards (which is what bio energy can do), you get stoichiometric amounts of a strong acid and base – eg electrolysing water. With electrolysis, if you turn off the current (and minimise gas evolution), when you mix, you’re back where you started.
That’s why marine scientists like alkalinity. It’s pretty much conserved.
And philincalifornia:
“Could you please explain to this Ph.D. chemist how water at an alkaline pH moving slightly closer to neutrality causes it to become corrosive.”
Check out a limestone cave.
Pat Moffitt says: December 26, 2011 at 4:19 pm
“Show me the calculations that can resolve a hundredth of a pH unit change.”
Laww of Mass Action. Sensible people don’t measure pH directly. They measure dissolved inorganic carbon and total alkalinity. These properties, fairly well consenved, are what actually determines solution of CaCO3. You can derive pH from the equilibria, but it doesn’t help very much.
Even direct pH quotes are really based on a calibration equilibrium (bromocresol), and computed from that equilibrium.
Pat Moffitt – “They could have saved me so much time spend needlessly studying the sciences”
So far Pat, all I’ve read from you is a whole bunch of handwaving and glaring knowledge gaps in regard to ocean acidification. How can you not know that CO2 will absorbed into the ocean once its atmospheric content (partial pressure) increases? And what do you think is causing the ocean pH to fall?
It’s a bit late to trundle out an appeal to authority when you’ve already demonstrated you don’t understand the fundamentals of ocean chemistry.
Rob Painting & Nick Stokes
Why do I get the impression that you are trying to teach your grandmothers to suck eggs?
Did you even think to do a Google search before engaging your…?
One dictionary definition:
cor·ro·sive [kuh-roh-siv]
adjective
1.
having the quality of corroding or eating away; erosive.
2.
harmful or destructive; deleterious: the corrosive effect of poverty on their marriage.
3.
sharply sarcastic; caustic: corrosive comments on the speaker’s integrity.
No mention of shells or limestone caves in any online dictionary I looked up
And:
Yes Rob, a Ph.D. chemist with 200 peer-reviewed publications, 50 issued patents, and a current profession that involves cutting through bullsh!t science, so let’s cut right to the chase here, cuing from LT’s comment:
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LazyTeenager says:
December 26, 2011 at 3:03 pm
Scientists know how to interpret terms like acidity based on context.
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…… but of course, as you all know, duped sheeple taxpaying voters don’t.
So every time you use the word “corrosive” in this context would you please add your shells and limestone caves phrases so it stays in context.
You might want to also check out the fact that there is extensive peer-reviewed literature showing local pH changes of greater than one pH unit on a daily basis.
Nick, I think you may have significant problems with the Anthropogenic Limestone Cave Formation meme, if that’s where you were going with that.
Pat Moffit says
There is no balancing act in nature- balance requires a steady state.
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I was not referring to a metaphysical balance of nature.
I was referring to the growth or not of a reef being dependent on the difference between creation and destruction processes. If the reef is approximately static in extent those processes must be equal in magnitude but opposite in sign: metaphorically speaking in balance like a seesaw.
Pat Moffitt on December 26, 2011 at 3:49 pm said:
So supposedly we know to a hundredth of a pH unit the impacts of changing CO2 but we don’t know whether or not the ocean are a sink or a source. How does that work?
———–
We know it’s a nett sink.
The Japanese satellite results showing this were linked to indirectly from this site.
If you go to the primary source, not the cherrypicked summary, you can see the seasonal and geographical distribution.
And there is a whole bunch of other info as well as it’s not hard to locate the evidence about this.
Feature sea cucumber recipes on the Food Network for a week.
Problem solved.
philincalifornia says
1.
having the quality of corroding or eating away; erosive.
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Phil you seem real worried by the idea that the use of the word corrosive will mislead people. How about another context.
Iron left outside rusts. The process and the product is called corrosion. The iron is said to corrode. The agent is air and water. So by any reasonable definition air and water can be said to be corrosive; to iron. the pH of the water involved is near 7.
I am sure many can also verify that iron ships corrodes in seawater.
So would it be sensible to avoid using descriptions like “the steel reinforcing in my skyscraper is suffering from corrosion” because it might decieve people.
philincalifornia – when seawater is strongly undersaturated (with respect to aragonite for instance) shells made from that material normally dissolve. Sounds corrosive to me. That’s why those oyster larvae up in Washington state and Oregon have been dying. The seawater dissolves their shells.
“You might want to also check out the fact that there is extensive peer-reviewed literature showing local pH changes of greater than one pH unit on a daily basis”
I’m sure many people understand that pH can undergo significant variability even within a day at certain locations. There was a paper published last week on that very topic. Marine life have adapted to tolerate these conditions, but it doesn’t confer some magic invulnerability to further declining pH, that’s just a logical fallacy. For more tolerant species they’ll simply exceed their threshold later. Based on lab experiments and field studies, enough species will be affected to become a very serious problem.
Robert E Phelan – the ‘sucking eggs’ saying refers to telling someone something they ready know. Clearly that doesn’t apply to Pat Moffitt and philincalifornia.
Rob Painting,
Enough already with the Pseudo-Skeptical Pseudo-Science talking points re: “ocean acidification”. That meme has been thoroughly debunked. I would go over the deconstruction of the “acidification” nonsense, but it has been debunked to death right here.
To help you get up to speed on the subject, here are a few articles from WUWT. There are a lot more in the archives if you need them. Reviewing this information should take you at least a couple of days, so you need to get started:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/06/19/the-electric-oceanic-acid-test
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/01/10/ocean-acidification-chicken-of-the-sea-little-strikes-again
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/24/chicken-little-of-the-sea-visits-station-aloha
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/12/07/tisdale-schools-the-website-skeptical-science-on-co2-obsession
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/21/oyster-crisis-yale-360-wwf-eco-activist-elizabeth-grossman-wrong-again-about-ocean-acidification
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/10/03/back-to-the-drawing-board-on-glacial-period-carbon-sinks
Report back when you’ve read the articles and comments. Or just skip the information, and post the latest “ocean acidification” alarmist talking points right away. Whether you really want to learn, or just argue, is entirely up to you.
Rob Painting says:
So, Google is NOT your friend? There is also a saying about fighting out of your class….
And yes, I did click on your name. Not impressed.
Smokey:
Skeptical science actually did do an excellent series on lowering PH of the ocean. The lowering PH of the oceans is much more of a concern than the small effect that co2 will have on temperature. The thrust of the GAGW folks is misplaced as the numerous metrics that affect climate, not weather, are not well enough understood to be modeled so that the models are credible. The changing of PH is hard basic chemistry and should not be discounted as a serious concern.
Rob:
Check the actual data on the Oregon/Washington clam thing. It was bacteria, had nothing to do with PH changes.
Rob:
Even tho I am banned from posting at Skeptical Science, I will defend what has been put there that is credibily correct.
Rob Painting says:
December 26, 2011 at 6:14 pm
Based on lab experiments and field studies, enough species will be affected to become a very serious problem.
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Right, very serious, ha ha ha. Like the serious problem of global warming, errrrrm climate change, errrm climate disruption. What are you calling that one now ??
Wake me up when that happens you dupe. In the meantime, I’ll cram down as many oysters and lobsters as I can before their impending doom.
Pat Moffit says
Everything is caused by tiny changes in CO2. Who knew it was that simple?
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Well no one is saying that. It’s a given that the system is complex.
But considering some of the other claims you have made I’ll observe that many systems, no matter how complex, are subject to a 90% 10% law. That is to say: including 10% of the components of a system will capture 90% of it’s behavior.
So producing quibbles by enumerating every single thing that might/maybe have an effect is a great way to be obstructive, but it is not a great way of understanding how the system works.
In fact your position sounds suspiciously similar to the “we don’t know everything therefore we know nothing” logical fallacy.
LazyTeenager says:
December 26, 2011 at 6:10 pm
So would it be sensible to avoid using descriptions like “the steel reinforcing in my skyscraper is suffering from corrosion” because it might decieve people.
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Dunno LT. I never studied the art of propaganda. I’ll take your word for it.
(and “i’ before “e” except after “c”)