Oh, darn, that’s not supposed to happen. Ove Hoegh-Guldberg will be outraged.
Marine scientists working on the coral reefs of Palau have made two unexpected discoveries that could provide insight into corals’ resistance and resilience to ocean acidification.
From the National Science Foundation via Eurekalert:
Press Release 14-010
Palau’s coral reefs surprisingly resistant to ocean acidification
Corals living in more acidic waters are healthy, but is the situation one-of-a-kind?
 Corals living in more acidic bays around Palau’s Rock Islands are surprisingly healthy.
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Marine scientists working on the coral reefs of Palau have made two unexpected discoveries that could provide insight into corals’ resistance and resilience to ocean acidification.
The team collected water samples at nine points along a transect that stretched from the open ocean, across a barrier reef, into a lagoon, and into the bays and inlets around the Rock Islands of Palau in the western Pacific Ocean.
With each location they found that the seawater became increasingly more acidic as they moved toward land.
“When we first plotted those data, we were shocked,” said chemical oceanographer Kathryn Shamberger of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). “We had no idea the level of acidification we would find. We’re looking at reefs today that have levels that we expect for the open ocean in that region by the end of the century.”
Shamberger conducted the fieldwork with other WHOI researchers, including biogeochemist Anne Cohen, as well as with scientists from the Palau International Coral Reef Center.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) funded the research through its Ocean Acidification Program, part of the agency’s Science, Engineering and Education for Sustainability Investment.
“This important study documents a coral reef system that’s apparently resistant to the effects of ocean acidification,” said David Garrison, program director in NSF’s Division of Ocean Sciences. “Understanding what factors account for this will be critical follow-on research.”
While ocean chemistry varies naturally at different locations, it is changing around the world due to increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
The ocean absorbs atmospheric carbon dioxide, which reacts with seawater, lowering the water’s overall pH and making it more acidic.
This process also removes carbonate ions needed by corals and other organisms to build their skeletons and shells.
Corals growing in low pH conditions, both in laboratory experiments that simulate future conditions and in other naturally low pH ocean environments show a range of negative effects.
These include juveniles of various species with difficulty constructing skeletons, fewer varieties of corals, less coral cover, more algae growth and more porous corals with greater signs of erosion from other organisms.
The new research results, published in a paper in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union, explain the biological and geomorphological causes of the more acidic waters near Palau’s Rock Islands.
The paper also describes a surprising second finding–that the corals living in those more acidic waters were unexpectedly diverse and healthy.
The unusual finding, contrary to what has been observed in other naturally low pH coral reef ecosystems, has important implications for the conservation of corals in all parts of the world.
“When you move from a high pH reef to a low pH neighboring reef, there are big changes, and they are negative changes,” said Cohen, a co-author of the paper and principal investigaor of the project.
“However, in Palau wherever the water is most acidic, we see the opposite. There’s a coral community that is more diverse, hosts more species and has greater coral cover than in the non-acidic sites.
“Palau is the exception to other places scientists have studied.”
Through analysis of the water chemistry in Palau, the scientists found that the acidification is primarily caused by the shell-building done by organisms living in the water, called calcification, which removes carbonate ions from seawater.
A second reason is the organisms’ respiration, which adds carbon dioxide to the water when they breathe.
“These things are all happening at every reef,” said Cohen. “What’s critical is the residence time of the seawater.”
“In Palau’s Rock Islands, the water sits in the bays for a long time before being flushed out,” said Shamberger. “This is a big area that’s a maze with lots of channels and inlets for the water to wind around.
“Calcification and respiration are continually happening at these sites while the water sits there, allowing the water to become more and more acidic. It’s a little bit like being stuck in a room with a limited amount of oxygen–the longer you’re in there without opening a window, you’re using up oxygen and increasing carbon dioxide.”
Ordinarily, she added, without fresh air coming in, it would become harder and harder for living things to thrive, “yet in the case of the corals in Palau, we’re finding the opposite. Coral cover and diversity actually increase from the outer reefs into the Rock Islands.”
The next steps are to determine whether the corals are genetically adapted to low pH, or whether Palau provides a “perfect storm” of environmental conditions.
“If it’s the latter, it means that if you took those corals out of that specific environment and put them in another low pH environment that doesn’t have the same combination of conditions, they wouldn’t be able to survive,” said Cohen. “But if they’re genetically adapted to low pH, you could put them anywhere.”
“These reef communities have developed under these conditions for thousands of years,” said Shamberger. “These are conditions that are going to be occurring in a lot of the ocean by the end of the century.
“We don’t know if other coral reefs will be able to adapt to ocean acidification–the time scale might be too short.”
The scientists are careful to stress that their findings in Palau are different from every other low pH environment that has been studied.
“When we discover a reef like Palau where the coral communities are thriving under low pH, that’s an exception,” said Cohen.
“It doesn’t mean that coral reefs around the globe are going to be fine under ocean acidification conditions. It does mean that there are some coral communities out there–and we’ve found one–that appear to have figured it out. But that doesn’t mean that all coral reef ecosystems are going to figure it out.”
This research was also funded by the WHOI Ocean Life Institute and The Nature Conservancy.
-NSF-
Calamatologists will continue to be ‘shocked’ as long a they leave their computer games at home and go out looking into the resilient Earth.
It can only be negative. We must act now!
I know I am the hundredth person to repeat this but all statements similar to “With each location they found that the seawater became increasingly more acidic as they moved toward land.” should be “seawater became more neutral”. We know it is agenda driven when the author completely skips over neutral and place acidic into the conversation/propaganda. But then word search won’t pick up neutral when the alarmist industry looks for a paper.
What is surprising about noticing that an ancient form of life, well adapted to a large range of conditions, is able to adapt as well to dynamic pH? AGW reduces the reasoning ability of its ardent believers.
I challenge anyone to work their way back through the journals citation tree and find the physical evidence to support higher pH in pre-industrial times. I tried, but could only ever find an a assumption.
Jimbo says:
January 24, 2014 at 5:12 am
The two main Paleozoic orders of coral, tabulate & rugose, were wiped out in the end Permian mass extinction event. They were replaced in the mid-Triassic fossil record by modern corals. The older orders thrived under atmospheric CO2 concentrations from 7000 ppm in the Cambrian to 300 ppm or less in the late Carboniferous to early Permian glaciation. Modern corals survived repeated excursions below 200 ppm during the Pleistocene glacial advances & levels on the order of ten times higher in the Mesozoic & early Cenozoic hot houses.
The threat of “acidification” to corals is complete, total & utter garbage purveyed by professional liars.
jimbo says,
“Corals growing in low pH conditions, both in laboratory experiments that simulate future conditions ”
what PH – how low in the laboratory, We have seen how the EPA allow acidic waters in areas of coral.
“and in other naturally low pH ocean environments show a range of negative effects”
“naturally low pH ocean environments” – what are you trying to say?
Most negative effects were from pollution and on certain islands it was heavily used as a building material.
Moat coral around the world is in good order.
You have not quoted me. You quoted what I indented and quoted as per the press release. Look at my comment again at the link provided below.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/01/23/palaus-coral-reefs-surprisingly-resistant-to-ocean-acidification/#comment-1547591
Here is another example of thriving corals with co2 bubbling between the corals in Papua New Guinea.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/12/28/the-fishes-and-the-coral-live-happily-in-the-co2-bubble-plume/
Unrealistic co2 experiment yields great results! Will the corals survive under our projected co2 output? I think they just might.
Willis says it best.
your right, sorry,
Must read all the post!!!!!
Anyone have any links to these fabled papers showing damage to coral reefs from carbonic acid in the NATURAL environment?
Richard Feynman on the Scientific Method: “First, you must make a guess… Then you must compare your guess to experience, or experiment… If the results disagree with the guess, then the guess is WRONG.”
@AussieBear January 23, 2014 at 5:25 pm:
“So they have found a reef community that seems to thrive in slightly lower pH environment than expected.”
An expectation, at its core, is a guess – that the future will be a certain way.
“If the results of experience disagree with the guess, then the guess is WRONG.”
But warmists continually confuse themselves and the issues by insisting that somehow the real-world results mean something other than them being wrong.
No. They are just wrong. Your garden variety of wrong.
Oh, and I’d be remiss if I did not equate this ocean acidification to acid rain.
Acid rain was a short-lived tree-hugger claim that industrial smokestack output was causing lakes in the NE USA, Canada and Europe to become acidic. It got so much press that the US Congress authorized money to sample lakes in the NE US. $35 million as I recall. Tree huggers bounded with glee into the woods to sample every lake in the entire NE.
The result? ONE – and only one – very small pond in a remote corner of NY state was measured as being acidic. ALL OF THE OTHER LAKES were found to be just fine.
That was about the last anybody heard of acid rain.
The enviros seem to be more hard-headed – more reality resistant – now than back in those days.
It’s probably a good thing that this paper was not accepted by Pattern Recognition in Physics journal.
Coral needs CO2 to breathe and yet >[CO2] hurts it?
The Role of Zooxanthellae
Each coral polyp is the host organism for photosynthetic algae called zooxanthellae. Photosynthetic means that the algae require sunlight to produce food, so coral reefs are found in shallow, clear water. However, the algae also require water and carbon dioxide, which are provided by the coral as by-products of its cellular respiration. In turn, the algae produce glucose (sugar), glycerol (fat), amino acids (used in making protein) and oxygen, all of which are needed by the coral to make its food.
Mutual Benefits
Both the coral and the zooxanthellae need this mutually beneficial relationship to survive. Coral provides protection, water and carbon dioxide for the algae, while the algae give the coral the nutrients it needs to produce food. In fact, the coral is so dependent on the algae that it acts in many ways like a plant, such as living where there is sufficient sunlight. Coral colonies that become stressed due to environmental conditions may expel, or blow, all the zooxanthellae, a process known as coral bleaching. When this happens, the coral soon dies.
Reef Building
A coral polyp secretes calcium carbonate, formed with the help of the zooxanthellae, to make the hard stony calyx. This acts as an external skeleton, providing protection from predators. From time to time, a polyp raises itself up off the floor of its calyx and secretes a new floor, leaving a small space between the new and old base. Over thousands of years, a colony of coral polyps secretes enough calcium carbonate to build a reef.
Read more: http://www.ehow.com/about_6365542_do-coral-reefs-depend-photosynthesis_.html#ixzz2rKwi1Mtw
Bad science not giving a table with the pH ranges, but then so is embarking on an income redistribution scheme without specifying how much redistribution is intended, how much improvement of the situation of the supposed recipients is intended, and if indeed any improvement in low standards of living are intended at all, or is it just to soak those more wealthy.
“These reef communities have developed under these conditions for thousands of years,” said Shamberger. “These are conditions that are going to be occurring in a lot of the ocean by the end of the century.
“We don’t know if other coral reefs will be able to adapt to ocean acidification–the time scale might be too short.”
I believe coral may be a little tougher and these worries are idiotic. From http://www.bikiniatoll.com/BIKINICORALS.pdf
In the northern atolls of the Marshall Islands, 23 nuclear tests with a total yield of 76.3 megatons (TNT equivalent) were conducted across seven test sites located either on the reef, on the sea, in the air and underwater between 1946 and 1958. Five craters were created, the deepest being the Bravo crater at 73 m depth (Noshkin et al., 1997a) (Figs. 2, 3). Post-test descriptions of environmental impacts include: surface seawater temperatures raised by 55,000 C after air-borne tests; blast waves with speeds of up to 8 m/s; and shock and surface waves up to 30 m high with blast columns reaching the floor of the lagoon (approximately 70 m depth)
The results of our nuclear war on coral.
A total of 183 scleractinian coral species was recorded, compared to 126 species recorded in the previous study
There are more species now than then.
gymnosperm says:
January 23, 2014 at 7:36 pm
Carbon dioxide loves to swim, but warm water will have none of this frolicking and is way too busy outgassing the excess it has to absorb any of the nasty gas from the atmosphere. One needs to understand that most of the CO2 in water does not form Carbonic acid or otherwise chemically change. It just enjoys the dip treading water as molecular CO2.
Not completely right: CO2 when dissolved in water can always be found in three forms: free CO2 (including a small amount of H2CO3, carbonic acid), bicarbonate ions and carbonate ions. How much of each depends of the pH: pure (rain)water is 99% free CO2 and a little bicarbonate and near zero carbonate ions at a low, slightly acid pH. Seawater is 1% free CO2, 90% bicarbonate and 9% carbonate. The Bjerrum plot gives the relative amounts of the three forms for seawater at different pH levels:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bjerrum_plot
If there is no continuous supply of fresh upwelling deep ocean waters, the ocean surface will get in equilibrium with the atmosphere for any temperature. If the CO2 pressure increases in the atmosphere, more CO2 will be dissoolved in the ocean surface, no matter its temperature.
But as there is a continuous upwelling, especially in the Pacific equatorial ocean, there is a continuous release of CO2. Near the poles, the sinking cold waters take a lot of extra CO2 with them into the deep oceans to return near the equator some 1000 years later… The effect of more CO2 in the atmosphere is to increase the uptake and decrease the release, as the exchange rate is directly proportional to the partial pressure difference of CO2 between waters and atmosphere. Much information can be found at:
http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/pubs/outstand/feel2331/maps.shtml
and the previous and following sections…
And as so many have already indicated: there is not the slightest damage to fear from the extra CO2 by corals and coccoliths, which did evolve in CO2 levels many times higher than today or the next centuries… See the magnificent pages of the Huxleyi coccolitophores (but don’t bother their GW stance):
http://www.soes.soton.ac.uk/staff/tt/eh/index.html
I don’t recall the time period when coral evolved, but I’m sure it was when CO2 levels were around 1,000 —> 5,000 PPM. No surprise that they are resistance to this.