From Duke University
Fluctuation ‘adds insult to injury’ for marine creatures
DURHAM, N.C. – A new Duke University-led study has documented dramatic, natural short-term increases in the acidity of a North Carolina estuary.
“The natural short-term variability in acidity we observed over the course of one year exceeds 100-year global predictions for the ocean as a whole and may already be exerting added pressure on some of the estuary’s organisms, particularly shelled organisms that are especially susceptible to changes in pH,” said Zackary I. Johnson, Arthur P. Kaupe Assistant Professor of Molecular Biology at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment.
The short-term spikes in the acidity of the estuary were driven by changes in temperature, water flow, biological activity and other natural factors, the researchers said. And they are occurring in addition to the long-term acidification taking place in Earth’s oceans as a result of human-caused climate change.
“For vulnerable coastal marine ecosystems, this may be adding insult to injury,” said Johnson, who was lead author of the study.
When the effects of long-term ocean acidification and short-term natural variation combine, they can create “extreme events” which may be especially harmful to coastal marine life, he said.
The study was conducted at the Pivers Island Coastal Observatory at the Duke Marine Lab in Beaufort, N.C., as part of a long-term coastal monitoring program. Researchers collected seawater samples from Beaufort Inlet weekly for a year and on a daily and hourly basis for shorter periods to track changes in the water’s pH and dissolved inorganic carbon on multiple time scales.
Numerous studies have shown that increasing amounts of atmospheric carbon dioxide from human sources are finding their way into the world’s oceans. When the carbon dioxide dissolves in seawater, it reduces the water’s pH and the ability of organisms to form calcium carbonate minerals that are the building blocks of many species’ shells and skeletons. This process is known as ocean acidification.
If current trends continue, experts predict that the mean ocean pH will decrease by about 0.2 units over the next 50 years. A drop of that magnitude could have far-reaching effects on ocean ecosystems and organisms.
“We may see significant changes in biological processes such as primary production,” said Dana Hunt, assistant professor of microbial ecology, who co-authored the new study. “Some organisms, such as phytoplankton, may benefit. Many others, including shelled organisms and corals, will not.”
The Duke team’s analysis showed that a wide range of natural variables, including changes in temperature, algal production and respiration, and water movement caused by tides and storms, triggered sharp spikes in the inlet’s acidity. Some changes occurred over the course of a season; others took place on a daily or hourly basis.
“Understanding to what extent pH naturally varies in coastal ecosystems worldwide will be essential for predicting where and when the effects of increasing ocean acidity will be most profound, and what organisms and ecosystems may be most affected,” Hunt said. “Our research demonstrates we have to take into account a wide range of environmental variables, not just pH.”
The study appears in the peer-reviewed open-access journal PLOS ONE.
Johnson and Hunt’s co-authors were research technician Benjamin Wheeler, doctoral student Christopher Ward and former undergraduate Christina Carlson, all of Duke; and Sara Blinebry, a student intern from Carteret County Community College. Blinebry is now a research technician in Johnson’s lab. Carlson is now a policy research assistant at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
The study was funded by National Science Foundation grants to Johnson and Hunt and through private support through Duke’s Nicholas School.
CITATION: “Dramatic Variability of the Carbonate System at a Temperate Coastal Ocean Site (Beaufort, North Carolina) is Regulated by Physical and Biogeochemical Processes on Multiple Timescales,” by Zackary I. Johnson, Benjamin J. Wheeler, Sara K. Blinebry, Christina M. Carlson, Christopher S. Ward, Dana E. Hunt. PLOS ONE, Dec. 17, 2013. DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0085117
for fun just emailed Zack Johnson the EPA rules and regulations. I wonder how long before the EPA rules and regulations of coastal waters is removed.
I think that there are people, who have conditions, which make them very susceptible to CO2 narcosis. Breathing or drinking any amount of dissolved CO2 causes hallucinations and erratic thought behavior. How else can we explain this rabid war on life’s natural food base? How do we get such people committed to a CO2 free sanitarium, where they cannot hurt themselves or anyone else. GK
Has anyone heard of rain water?
The pH of which is 5.5 . This means that when rain falls on the ocean, there is a temporary shift in pH, which can seem ‘brutal’, especially to the soft hearts of Greenies…
rgbatduke
I suggest you complain to the EPA, they allow quite a range on PH in Coastal waters.
RGB , why do you use the term acidification, do you mean less base or is it to scare us.
From a NOAA workshop.
“Tripling the pre-industrial atmospheric CO2
concentration will cause a reduction in surface ocean
pH that is almost three times greater than that experienced during transitions from glacial to interglacial
periods. This is often termed “ocean acidification” because it describes the process of decreasing pH. Current projections of ocean acidification suggest that
the pH of surface ocean waters will continue to decline. However, the term can also lead to confusion
when it is wrongly assumed that the oceans will become acidic, when in reality, ocean pH is never expected to fall below 7.0; i.e., the oceans are becoming
less basic, but not acidic. Such a phenomenon could
only occur in the unlikely event that CO2 emissions
reach more than 10,000 Pg C (Caldeira and Wickett,
2005)”
Canadian Water Quality
Guidelines for the Protection
of Aquatic Life
pH
(Marine)
7.5 – 8.5, that is quite a range.
“The pH of marine waters is usually quite stable (between
7.5 and 8.5 worldwide) and is similar to that of estuarine
waters because of the buffering capacity provided by the
abundance of strong basic cations such as sodium,
potassium, and calcium and of weak acid anions such as
carbonates and borates (Wetzel 1983). Higher pHs are
usually found in near-surface waters because of solar
radiationBiological Effects
A broad spectrum of marine and estuarine organisms have
been shown to be adversely affected by pH fluctuations,
many of these effects being physiological. A decrease in
pH was correlated with a reduction in carapace weight,
increased magnesium content (with constant calcium….”
So we see that natural marine systems exist and thrive across a wide range of changing pH, mineral and nutrient dynamics, as well as temperatures.
The climate kooks and hypesters twist that to claim the systems are fragile and under dangerous change. Yet offer no evidence of either fragility or dangerous changes.
As a Duke parent, whose daughter got a very good education there. Which has led her professional work in public health issues. And she is well track for a masters in Public Health, I think painting Duke with a broad negative brush is not really fair or accurate. There are many concerns about our higher education system that are justified. Asserting that Duke is graduating morons is not one of those justified concerns.
RGB, I was trying to figure a way to say basically what you said so… What RBG said! BTW, too bad about the Chic-fil-a bowl. Gig’em Aggies, WHOOP!
RGB says:”…and have without question directly driven numerous species to extinction.”
Please define numerous and what would those numerous species be?
It’s unfortunate that the authors of the paper immediately link their study with the issue of ocean acidification because if they had just limited it to what their title describes “Dramatic Variability of the Carbonate System at a Temperate Coastal Ocean Site (Beaufort, North Carolina) is Regulated by Physical and Biogeochemical Processes on Multiple Timescales”, they would be presenting a credible paper.
This study is piggy-backing itself on a flawed study which did not conclusively show that any significant acidification has occurred over the past 250 years, so the introduction itself is flawed. The body presents no evidence that supports their conclusions about the hypothesis that the increase in CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is leading to increased acidification of the oceans, it simply shows that in a highly dynamic system, the variability of the pH is going to be highly dynamic, and sets a benchmark for further studies which can potentially be used to support the hypothesis.
This paper demonstrates everything the title says with the support of good scientific methodology. My criticism of the actual study is that they didn’t cover the role of calcium in the carbonate buffer system. This is unfortunate, because the limiting nutrient for marine organisms to form their shells of calcium carbonate is not the carbonate ion, it is the calcium ion – zebra mussels, a current invasive species in North American waters, cannot reproduce in waters which do not have a calcium concentration of at least 12ppm. When they describe Total Alkalinity (Talk) they mention phosphate (PO4) and silica hydroxide (SiOH3) but they fail to mention calcium and magnesium, the two major ions responsible for Talk – which is frequently expressed in units of miliequivalents (meq) of calcium and also referred to as hardness. I have a few more minor criticisms of some technical aspects of the paper but they do not impact what the title of the paper describes.
BTW, they are correct in terms of describing it as acidity because the term ‘alkalinity’ carries a different meaning when dealing with limnology (fresh water) and oceanography (seawater), rather than chemistry. Acidity is used to describe the pH, with a pH of 14 being the least acidic, not the most alkaline. Alkalinity is used to describe the ability of the water to neutralize the acidity and is frequently termed as ‘hardness’ in water treatment, because of its tendency to form scale (magnesium and calcium carbonate) in pipes.
HT to rgbatduke, I sympathize with your moral outrage at the slurs to your Alma Mater.
Please, lets not be so fast to tar everyone with the same brush.
Remember that one of the most knowledgeable posters on WUWT is “rgb at Duke” (aka Dr. Brown)
Research so far has shown that Antarctic marine microbes can tolerate the natural large seasonal fluctuations of CO2 concentrations from 84 to 643 ppm. However, above 1281 ppm there are dramatic changes in the species composition and size of microbial cells. Large phytoplankton above 0.02 mm in size greatly decline, while smaller species less than 5 µm increased.
http://www.antarctica.gov.au/science/cool-science/2013/changes-forecast-for-marine-microbial-communities
The vertical pH profile for the oceans drops quickly with depth. Any form of upwelling delivers sunken nutrients which promotes a burst of biological productivity. That same upwelling raises de-oxygneated more acidic water. Attributing changes in ocean pH to CO2 without accounting for that upwelling effect means such attribution is meaningless
Matt Skaggs says:
For more on this, see Cliff Mass Weather Blog, “Coastal Ocean Acidification: Answering the Seattle TImes”:
http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2013/11/coastal-ocean-acidification-answering.html
@MarkW
>LEt me see if I have this right. There are huge natural variations in acidity that organisms have no trouble dealing with. On the other hand the small changes caused by CO2 are going to cause everything to die?
I see you are beginning to understand how this CAGW thing works. Very good. You get a star.
@Ivor Ward (aka Disko Troop)
>How do you “insult” a shellfish?
Give him a knitted pair of sweat pants with, “I love monopods” embroidered on it.
Point out the pattern is “knit 1, perl 2”.
Ask him if he polishes his shell with Bivalvoline Oil.
If he tries to say anything, tell him to clam-up.
Being serious, although I hate the Duke athletic department because I am a UNC fan, do not let this one report affect your viewpoint on the education you receive at Duke. It really does provide some of the best education money can buy. Duke is one of the best medical colleges in the US and thus has one of the best hospitals in this country. If I needed major surgery, Duke hospital is the first place I would want to be. Do not judge the many by the actions of a few.
Said like a gentleman and a scholar. And right back at you — much as I detest UNC athletics (I was a Duke freshman in 1973, the year of the dread 8 point-17 second loss at UNC) UNC-CH is one of the premier state Universities in the country and indeed the world. I’ve got one son at UNC-Greensboro and another at UNC Asheville who is thinking of transferring to Chapel Hill. My wife (a Duke grad) graduated from UNC’s medical school. As for the rivalry — neither side would have it any other way. The nice thing is they are both entirely respectable, clean programs. Academics first, athletics second, and little under the table stuff. So one can hate UNC (or, I’m sure, Duke) with honor either way.
My wife would also say (probably correctly) that while Duke’s medical system is great for exotic stuff, you might actually get better treatment at UNC for the more mundane.
The point in the end being that there is far too much anger and rancor over any issue connected with the scientific question of the connection between human-generated CO_2 an the climate. Both sides have an entirely annoying tendency to descend to ad hominem attack at the least provocation, to impugn both the honor and the motives of the other, to claim the high ground of evidentiary and scientific support as their unique province. I can think of absolutely nothing “evil” about measuring estuarine pH by sampling the water off of Pivers Island on a regular basis. The tide flows in and out of there like a river twice a day — part of the day pulling nearly straight from the Atlantic, part of the day pulling from the Neuse river basin (basically filtered brackish swampwater drained from North Carolina’s mostly acidic soil). Whether the result is or is not expected, whether or not it is presented as part of a narrative that might not be true, the data speak for themselves, and are no doubt useful in the long run as a small part of a developing big picture. There is nothing moronic about doing that kind of research, especially with undergraduates seeking a first exposure to “real science” which this most definitely is.
The most useful comments above are ones that any scientist might make. Why off of Pivers Island? Well, it’s not a terrible sampling location — there is a tidal gauge on the island, it’s square at the entrance to the Beaufort harbor with a strong tidal current, the current flows around the island in a complex pattern that splits between a river estuary (under the US 70 bridge) and Taylor Creek (that runs in front of Beaufort and back into the sound). Basically, several different sources of water meet and mix at Pivers Island, so it is a place where the variation in pH might be expected to be most extreme. Still, one might expect a future extension of the research to sample in a number of other locations, perhaps eventually providing a dynamic picture of how AND WHY the pH changes — watching relatively acidic waters propagate down the rivers and lowering the pH at successive sampling sites along the way. In the longer run, very precise measurements at one site might reveal whether or not there is any discernible trend under the enormously fluctuating signal. Also, a good scientist would question whether or not the conclusion that this fluctuation adds “insult to injury” is justified — if this is a natural cycle of pH fluctuation that has been occurring for hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands of years, clearly the “insult” is something the estuarine ecology is well equipped to handle. The “injury” begs an unmeasured question — has human activity changed the baseline pH of the Pivers Island site at all over time?
The answer there could be yes or no — fifty years ago, it was a sandspit island with a bunch of shacks on it. The perimeter of the entire island was then surrounded by a seawall that is at least a half a meter higher than the highest spring tides, backfilled with sand, levelled off at a height some meter and a half above the average sea level, planted with grass, ground cover, and sufficiently salt-tolerant trees, and built up into a proper research and teaching facility. NOAA occupies the first third of the island — Duke is on the outside two thirds. It is connected to Radio Island (the US 70 causeway) between Beaufort and Morehead City by a bridge, and is right next to a second bridge from the causeway over to Beaufort proper. If you look at maps of the inlet that date back to civil war times, humans have completely redrawn the shape of the islands and sound over the years, and hurricanes periodically resculpture it as well. What is now Radio and Pivers Island at one time was known as “Shark Island” (I’m not making this up, and the entire inlet is truly lousy with sharks, who come to munch on the blues, the spanish mackerel, the menhaden, the mullet, the flounder, and all the other “good eats” of a healthy marine ecology including the VERY infrequent tourist:-).
Concrete is of course artificial limestone, and highly alkaline. One expects that the seawall alone might alter the local pH measured literally a few centimeters from said wall island towards alkalinity, by a small amount that would tend back towards acidic over time as accessible lime leaches out and as the wall is covered by algae and barnacles. Covering what might have been either a sandy or mucky bottom with rip-rap and concrete might have further changed the local chemistry when the island was built. Altering the currents no doubt changed things more. Without the sea wall, the island might not even still be there, given half a century of hurricanes — the unprotected islands outside of the inlet “walk” at a fairly steady rate as sand disappears one place to show up someplace else. Last year Sandy ate almost half a mile of the end of Shackleford Bank, a process that is not yet re-equilibrated, spreading the sand that used to be its tip out all over the inlet itself and completely altering the currents in and out of the inlet (they are now much more dangerous, and they weren’t exactly safe before!).
The ocean is all about change — it is by its nature a highly dynamical system. Humans try to resist or alter its natural patterns at their peril — as Sandy clearly indicated, just because the Morehead harbor has been open through the gap to the Atlantic for a century plus doesn’t mean that it will remain so forever. Dredgers worked all summer to keep it open last summer, and even so tour boats whose captains have piloted literally thousands of tours around the inlet area over decades kept getting stuck last summer as sandbars formed of ex-Shackleford sand suddenly appeared where deepwater existed two years ago. In order to BEGIN to discern human influences on its change — and I have no doubt at all that we do have influences, especially where we build — we have to measure literally everything we can about the system and come to understand its natural cycles. This is just as true of the climate — discerning human-produced “warming” in a constantly changing NATURAL climate system is almost impossible to do until one understands the natural system well enough to answer simple questions that currently have no useful (and certainly no simple) answers, such as “What caused the Little Ice Age?”
rgb
Estuaries suffer daily changes in pH that are larger by far than the predicted effect of CO2 dissolving in the water. In fact, there is no evidence that more CO2 has any negative effects at all on marine life, as they evolved under conditions with much higher CO2 than the present.
This is all propaganda/alarmism to push a political agenda. Marine life, particularly the photosynthetic producer trophic level of the food web simply love to have more CO2. It begs the education of these researcher for them not to understand that these organisms have metabolic power to make use of the higher CO2 and ameliorate/ignore any supposed change in pH.
In fact, seawater is a complex buffer that naturally resists changes in pH, particularly from a weak acid such as carbonic acid.
Furthermore, CO2 and carbonic acid are part of a long chain of equilibrium from CO2 to carbonic acid to bicarbonate (& a proton, H+) to carbonate (& a H+) to calcium carbonate, and any increase in CO2 at one end of the chain will force a greater deposition of calcium carbonate, the law of mass action. The fact is that any protons (H+) given off by these equilibria cannot affect these equilibria—an equilibrium cannot affect itself—an outside source of protons would be required to affect these equilibria.
rgb
“and I have no doubt at all that we do have influences, especially where we build”
absolutely!!
and don’t get me started on the spread of non-indigenous species from the movement of the human population around the world.
non- indigenous animals.
“Since their introduction from Europe in the 19th century, the effect of rabbits on the ecology of Australia has been devastating. They are suspected of being the most significant known factor in species loss in Australia. The extent of plant species’ loss is unknown at this time though it is known that rabbits often kill young trees in orchards, forests, and on properties by ringbarking them”
Rabbits are also responsible for serious erosion problems, as they eat native plants, leaving the topsoil exposed and vulnerable to sheet, gully, and wind erosion. The removal of this topsoil is devastating to the land, as it takes many hundreds of years to regenerate
Rabbits are also responsible for serious erosion problems, as they eat native plants, leaving the topsoil exposed and vulnerable to sheet, gully, and wind erosion. The removal of this topsoil is devastating to the land, as it takes many hundreds of years to regenerate
They also alter the climate. Plants have a generally cooling effect — their respiration is a natural air-conditioner and they transform some of the incoming solar energy into stored forms instead of heat. They bind the soil. It takes only a small bit of damage to a marginal ecosystem to transform a marginal ecology into a desert, and the desert will often be considerably hotter (or at least, will have much less moderated temperatures) that the scrublands it replaces. Goatherding is thought to have created much of the sahara desert, with an enormous, global impact on climate, and “desertification” continues today in part aided by human encroachment and diversion of water supplies or use of the resources that (barely) bind the land.
Then there are kudzu, snakehead fish, zebra mussels. Some of these have been embraced by the local ecology without breaking it — kudzu hasn’t quite covered the Earth as it was early predicted to do, for example. Snakeheads have an impact that is just starting to be felt as they spread, especially in Maryland but fish have been sighted in NC and the Great Lakes and Florida. Zebra mussels completely altered the fishing patterns in the Great Lakes in my lifetime — one could catch all sorts of perch in next to the shore in Lake Huron in 1980, but now the perch only bite offshore in 20-30 feet of water where the zebra mussels won’t grow. Freshwater clams in local streams have been shown to be very sensitive to agricultural contaminants in the water. The sad thing is that so many environmental scientists are worrying about CAGW (and so much money is being diverted there) that there aren’t as many doing work in places like this where human influence is easy to find, uncontroversial, and there are easy steps one can take to improve things without bringing down modern civilization in the process.
Although fixing the snakehead problem is going to be pretty damn difficult, just as fixing the kudzu problem proved to be, now that they are “established” in the Potomac river basin. They can survive on land for up to four days under moist conditions, and can wriggle hundreds of meters to bridge gaps between reservoirs or waterways as they spread out. In the end, we’ll probably just have to live with them and if it means that certain local species become extinct there may not be a lot we can do about it. Unless somebody comes up with a very, very specific way to target “just” snakeheads with some sort of biological vector, they are already through most of the barriers erected to try to slow their spread.
rgb
Environmental and Economic Costs Associated with Non-Indigenous
http://www.grida.no/geo/GEO/Geo-2-084.htm
by D Pimentel – Related articles
Invading non-indigenous species in the United States cause major environmental damages and losses adding up to more than $138 billion per year.
Are invasive species a major cause of
extinctions?
http://www.des.ucdavis.edu/faculty/grosholz/InvasionReadings.pdf
ALIEN – Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries
http://www.nda.agric.za/docs/Infopaks/Alien.html
A great deal of South Africa’s water is used by plants that do not belong here. … These plants are invasive because they spread and displace our natural trees … Many springs and streams have already dried up because of invading alien trees. … soil is then washed into rivers causing the rivers and dams to fill up with sand.
and on and on and on……..
HT to rgbatduke, I sympathize with your moral outrage at the slurs to your Alma Mater.
Not really a problem. I just sometimes wonder if the people who comment so nastily realize that there are human beings at the other end of those comments, in this case undergraduate students. Would they actually attend a poster session where the students presented this kind of work and then go up to them and say “You’re a moron, and everyone else at your University is a moron, because I disagree with something you said”?
Not every Duke student is a rocket scientist, although a damn good lot of them could be rocket scientists if they weren’t more interested in becoming physicians, lawyers, business persons, scientists, or simply happy and successful human beings. A rather large chunk of the kids I teach are “scary smart”. But even the most clueless (about heavy math and physics, which is my own greatest concern:-) are hardly morons — they may well suck at math and physics but still be rather bright and quite good at other things. And there are many reasons a student might suck at math and physics in a classroom setting and not really be stupid even about math or physics.
I liked your direct assessment of the science. It seemed well-balanced and better than I can generate myself, since the last chemistry class I took was in 1974. This is ever so much more useful than pointless railing against the personal characteristics of the people who conducted the study.
rgb
Please define numerous and what would those numerous species be?
Going back how far? There are well documented cases of humans simply hunting a number of species to extinction — e.g. the passenger pigeon, the dodo, tasmanian tigers — but these are only over the last few hundred years. If you go back in North America or Australia proper, humans wiped out basically all of the large mammals by hunting them to extinction some 10,000 years ago:
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=98510
In other cases it is more difficult to see whether or not humans per se are responsible for the extinctions as the extinct species aren’t human prey animals, but humans have again without any doubt at all driven species to extinction simply by invading their habitat and destroying the niche they once occupied. Not just animal species, but plants.
You might or might not agree that global warming is causing parts of the current mass extinction event, and I might or might not agree as well, but that the extinction event is occurring is pretty well documented, see e.g. here:
http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/biodiversity/elements_of_biodiversity/extinction_crisis/
Their estimate of the current extinction rate is 1 to 5 species a year. Some of this may be due to overbroad characterization of just what a “species” is, but even if one accepts only the lowball estimate, that is a pretty hefty rate on millennial timescales. Note that they can count 1000 species by name that have gone extinct over the last 500 years, and that is probably only a fraction of the total. Humans may not have caused all of these, but it is rather likely that we are the ultimate cause of most of them.
Again, why is this surprising? If one has a species of freshwater clam that only lives in a handful of streams in central North Carolina (as in fact exist, a few miles from where I’m sitting) then that species is pretty vulnerable to any sort of factor that makes its niche vulnerable. Building a dam to create an impoundment. The widespread use of toxic compounds on agricultural land that drains into the waterways. A very bad string of drought years. The introduction of non-native species of fish into the impoundments who have a taste for clams and who migrate up the waterways. All of the above.
Of course there are no doubt other species of closely related clams living more generally that survive, and it is doubtful the stream ecology will collapse without the clams, but there is always the chance that something one of THESE clams evolved for their local habitat will turn out to be useful. We are just beginning to appreciate the enormous value of genes and are still only one or two generations into the time when genes can more or less directly be manipulated — we haven’t even fully grown into the possibilities of genetic science. One day we may well rue the broad extinction of so many species great and small simply because every one of them carries off with it a (potential) wealth of genetic expression that we will have to work hard to rediscover. The cure to cancer, metaphorically if not literally, could be sitting on a branch in the middle of the Amazon rainforest, awaiting discovery, if the branch on which it is sitting isn’t cut down and turned into firewood or furniture first.
It’s sort of like burning oil for energy. Yes, it is a fabulous energy source. But any organic chemist cringes at the notion, as you are burning raw materials that require ever so much more energy and effort to directly synthesize and that can be used as an inexpensive starting point to make many useful things. Burning trees for energy when one of the yet-unnamed tree fungi could produce a super-antibiotic (if discovered in time) is in the same category of affair — there is no doubt that somebody needs energy and that old-growth Amazonian timber can provide it, but that doesn’t mean that doing so is without price in the long run.
rgb