In northern winter, the Bering Sea, dividing Alaska and Siberia, becomes the most acidic region on earth (in purple) as shown in this February 2005 acidity map in pH scale. Temperate oceans are less acidic. The equatorial Pacific is left blank due to its high variability around El Niño and La Niña events. (Takahashi)A team of scientists has published the most comprehensive picture yet of how acidity levels vary across the world’s oceans, providing a benchmark for years to come as enormous amounts of human-caused carbon emissions continue to wind up at sea.
“We have established a global standard for future changes to be measured,” said Taro Takahashi, a geochemist at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory who published the maps with his colleagues in the August issue of the journal Marine Chemistry. The maps provide a monthly look at how ocean acidity rises and falls by season and geographic location, along with saturation levels of calcium carbonate minerals used by shell-building organisms. The maps use 2005 as a reference year and draw on four decades of measurements by Lamont-Doherty scientists and others.The oceans have taken up a quarter of the carbon dioxide humans have put in the atmosphere over the last two hundred years.
But their help in offsetting global warming has come at a price: the oceans are growing more acidic as they absorb our excess CO2. To what extent ocean acidification may harm marine life and ecosystems is still unclear, but already signs of stress have appeared in corals, mollusks and other shell-builders living in regions with naturally more acidic water. Since the industrial era began, average surface seawater pH in temperate oceans has fallen from 8.2 to 8.1 by 0.1 pH unit, equal to a 30 percent increase in acid concentration. (A lower pH indicates more acidic conditions.)The saturation state of the mineral aragonite, essential to shell-builders, tends to fall as waters become more acidic. The South Pacific Ocean is heavily oversaturated with respect to aragonite (in red) while the polar oceans (in blue) are less saturated, as shown in this February 2005 map. The pink lines represent approximate polar sea ice edges. (Takahashi)
Taro Takahashi has spent more than four decades measuring the changing chemistry of the world’s oceans. Here, aboard the R/V Melville, he celebrates after sampling waters near the bottom of the Japan Trench in 1973. (Lamont-Doherty archives)The vast tropical and temperate oceans, where most coral reefs grow, see the least variation, with pH hovering between 8.05 and 8.15 as temperatures fluctuate in winter and summer. Here, the waters are oversaturated with respect to the mineral aragonite—a substance that shell-building organisms need to thrive.Ocean pH fluctuates most in the colder waters off Siberia and Alaska, the Pacific Northwest and Antarctica. In spring and summer, massive plankton blooms absorb carbon dioxide in the water, raising pH and causing seawater acidity to fall. In winter, the upwelling of CO2-rich water from the deep ocean causes surface waters to become more acidic. Acidification of the Arctic Ocean in winter causes aragonite levels to fall, slowing the growth of pteropods, planktic snails that feed many predator fish. The maps reveal that the northern Indian Ocean is at least 10 percent more acidic than the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, which could be due to its unique geography. Cut off from the Arctic Ocean, the chemistry of the northern Indian Ocean is influenced by rivers draining the massive Eurasian continent as well as seasonal monsoon rains.By analyzing long-term data collected off Iceland, Bermuda, the Canary Islands, Hawaii and the Drake Passage, off the southern tip of South America,
Takahashi finds that waters as far north as Iceland and as far south as Antarctica are acidifying at the rate of 5 percent per decade. His estimate corresponds to the amount of CO2 humans are adding to the atmosphere, and is consistent with several recent estimates, including a 2014 study in the journal Oceanography led by Nicholas Bates, research director at the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences.“This is exactly what we’d expect based on how much CO2 we’ve been putting in the air,” said Rik Wanninkhof, a Miami-based oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) who was not involved in the study. “This is an important point for scientists to underscore—these calculations are not magic.”If the current pace of ocean acidification continues, warm-water corals by 2050 could be living in waters 25 percent more acidic than they are today, said Takahashi.
While corals can currently tolerate shifts that big, marine biologists wonder if they can sustain growth at lower pH levels year-round. “In the long run it is the average pH that corals see that matters to their ability to grow and build a coral reef,” said Chris Langdon, a marine biologist at the University of Miami, who was not involved in the study.<Ocean acidification is already having an impact, especially in places where the seasonal upwelling of deep water has made seawater naturally more acidic. In a recent study by researchers at NOAA, more than half of the pteropods sampled off the coast of Washington, Oregon and California showed badly dissolved shells. Ocean acidification has been linked to fish losing their ability to sniff out predators, and the die-off of baby oysters in hatcheries off Washington and Oregon, where more acidic deep water comes to the surface each spring and summer.By 2100, ocean acidification could cost the global economy $3 trillion a year in lost revenue from fishing, tourism and intangible ecosystem services, according to a recent United Nations report.
The U.S. Government Accountability Office, the watchdog arm of Congress, has reached similar findings and recommended that President Obama create a research and monitoring program dedicated to ocean acidification.Other authors of the study: Stuart Sutherland, David Chipman (now retired), John Goddard and Cheng Ho, all of Lamont-Doherty; and Timothy Newberger, Colm Sweeney and David Munro, all of University of Colorado, Boulder.
“… it is just stupid to pretend that today’s increases bother any organism in a negative way.”
Yep – also stupid to pretend that organisms are going to care about a change which is a couple of orders of magnitude smaller than the natural variation they are exposed to on a seasonal basis.
This is exactly my thoughts on all of the claims on impact of warming on vegetation. My oak trees back in New England didn’t give a hoot if the first day over 50deg happened in March or April. And they also didn’t care if the first day below 50Deg happened in August or Sept.
None of them every packed up and left, and none of them died.
The lack of common sense boggles the mind.
The average level of CO2 for the period of modern life on earth, post Carboniferous, is about 1,500ppm. I wouldn’t start worrying until we hit that.
I didn’t understand the story on the new research. But after reading all of your comments I feel as though I have just had a semester of Chemistry 301 and have a good basic grasp of ocean chemistry, I have learned a great deal. Thank you commenters.
More Chemistry 101 – but that is still better than the authors of this paper and press release.
Somehow I am at a loss. As I sit at my desk sipping my Coca-Cola, small bubbles rise up as its temperature rises from 37 F to room temperature. The bubbles are CO2 driven out of solution by the rising temperature. My conclusion is global warming should drive off carbonic acid (CO2 in solution) making the water more alkaline, not more acid.
If acidity is the problem, more heat is the answer. Am I right or wrong?
You are correctly observing Le Chatellier’s principle, governed over your desk by Henry’s law. Basic physical chemistry, both.
Warmunists want ‘climate science’ reversals of those well established principles. Beyond unlikely.
The point is that the increase in temperature has little influence on the partial pressure of CO2 in the oceans: some 8 μatm/°C. Meanwhile the atmospheric pCO2 increased with 110 μatm, thus the net CO2 flux is from the atmosphere into the oceans, not reverse. That also can be seen in the increase of total carbon (DIC) in the ocean surface. If the temperature (or pH) were leading, DIC would decrease with lower pH and/or higher temperatures. But all series show the opposite: increased DIC, despite lower pH and higher temperatures…
OK. 2013 CO₂ emissions:
http://co2now.org/Current-CO2/CO2-Now/global-carbon-emissions.html
9.9 billion metric tonnes. One cubic kilometer of seawater: 1 billion tonnes.
Volume of the oceans: 1,385,999,653 cubic Km. Assume that ALL of the CO₂ goes into solution:
9.9/1,385,999,653 (by weight) 0.000000714285%
Of course all 9.9 Gt doesn’t go into solution. And the argument that it’s confined to the surface layers is basically poppycock.
Which makes most of the human-CO₂-caused “acidification” a load o fbunk, just based on concentrations alone. Someone might quickly calculate the pH reduction of seawater if ALL of the CO₂ were dissolved? I’m too lazy to continue at this point. The thought that someone granted funds to such a study makes me very tired.
Mike, the exchange with the deep oceans is too slow to absorb all CO2 emitted by humans in short term. Of the 9 GtC/year only 0.5 GtC goes quickly in the ocean surface, which then is saturated. 1 GtC goes into vegetation and 3 GtC goes into the deep oceans, the rest, ~4.5 GtC remains in the atmosphere.
See essay Shell Games in ebook Blowing Smoke. Nuf said. Canards still don’t fly.
and all from those who wont listen to science
Distribution matters. So is the implication that the well mixed greenhouse gas migrates seasonally to the Bering sea to confer primal protons to the ocean?
I am sure this is already factored in to Ferdinand’s formula but only a very small percentage of CO2 that enters the ocean forms carbonic acid and reduces pH. The vast majority simply goes for a swim as molecular CO2 without contributing protons.
More seriously the Bering Straits prevent contact with the ice (at least during interglacials), brine rejection, and the saline subduction that takes place in the North Atlantic and Southern oceans. The North Pacific waters are cold enough to suck up a lot of CO2 but not salty enough to sink.
No self respecting scientist with an ounce of integrity would call 8.1 acid, nor would they talk of acidification when an alkaline solution moved very slightly towards neutrality.
Therefore the authors have no respect for either themselves or for their scientific discipline, nor do they have any integrity as scientists. They are merely out for a funding boost from the ignorant people who hold the purse strings.
The deep ocean, the abyssal plains are basalt from the spreading ridges. Basalt because they are primarily magnesium minerals. Basalt = basic salts, = magnesium salts, = Milk of Magnesia, = acidic buffers. Huge unimaginably so buffering capacity across many thousand of square Km’s in the deep benthic regions of the oceans. The continental shelves are lined with calcium carbonate deposits from ancient carbonate creatures (diatoms); the White Cliffs of Dover, those are common across the world’s continental shelves. Massive amounts of carbonate buffering in the shallow waters.
Between the abyssal plains magnesium basalts and the continental-shelf CaCO2 deposits, the ocean’s buffering will not allow more than 0.2 pH change in either direction for even the most massive of pCO2 excursions.
CaCO3, a glass of wine allowed me to miss the obvious Chem 101 mistake.
[White or red? .mod]
Was it the same glass of wine that inspired your Basalt=basic salts? A nice mnemonic but I bet it wasn’t what the Romans meant by basanites.
Ok. ‘Acidification’ is caused by upwelling of water with decay by-products. How does atmospheric CO2 make the waters more acidic, does it displace other chemical which would otherwise be outgassed?
Ocean “acidification” is crap-ola. It is the Warmunists last-gasp attempt to find some way to demonize CO2.
“…to find some way to continue to get grants/funding.”
There. Fixed it for ya.
Actually the OA model being pushed by the climate hypesters is just a sciencey bit of bs.
How the hell does the sea between Alaska and Siberia absorb CO2 in winter WHEN IT IS COVERED IN ICE?
The paper itself says:
And here’s the claim in the press release:
Mmmm … -0.002 pH per year is -0.02 pH per decade, or about 0.2 pH units per century. The water off of the coast of California where I live changes that much every couple of weeks. Since their threatened change over a century is less than the change in a couple of weeks in the ocean off of where I live, I fear the alarmism doesn’t ring true.
Actually, that calculation is indeed magic. It’s now 2014. If the pH decreases by 5% per decade, that’s about 18 percent less alkaline by 2050, not 25%.
And this overlooks the fact that using their own numbers (0.02 pH/decade), it’s only 4.5% per decade, or 16% change by 2050, nowhere near 25%.
Gotta say … when I see claims like 3.6 times 5% equals 25%, and the final answer increases the alarm, the paper goes straight to the circular file.
w.
PS—Can I register a huge objection to measuring changes in alkalinity/acidity in percent? There’s a good reason that we use a logarithmic scale, which is that the effects and the strength vary with the log of the underlying measurements. Using percentages leads to a hugely inflated estimate of the effects of such changes.
Oh, but Willis, you’re entirely missing the point. If “scientists” gave pH data using the pH logarithmic scale, it wouldn’t sound nearly scary enough…
It’s much scarier to say, “‘acidity’ will increase 30%”, because low-information voters get the impression oceans will soon be as acidic as battery acid if we continue driving those evil cars and stop building $multi-billion solar farms…
Who wants to snorkel in battery acid?
To too many climatologists, it’s not about finding and disseminating the truth, it’s about securing grant funding to pump out bogus propaganda puff papers like this one.
Excellent point, Willis. That this paper passed peer review is an indictment of the peer reviewers.
A huge pile of horse dung fodder. Unbelievable.
“In a recent study by researchers at NOAA, more than half of the pteropods sampled off the coast of Washington, Oregon and California showed badly dissolved shells.”
Surface seawater cannot dissolve pteropods shell because it is supersaturated in aragonite. They are probably exposed to deep seawater which is unsaturated in aragonite. Are they dead? If not, why is it bad? Marine organisms constantly rebuild their shells.
“By 2100, ocean acidification could cost the global economy $3 trillion a year in lost revenue from fishing, tourism and intangible ecosystem services”
These are all projections of models. What are the real economic and environmental impacts of ‘OA’ today? No mention. Perhaps because there is none.
Fourty-five years a chemist, one of the earliest to specialise in environmental chemistry and I have never read such unmitigated, unbalanced twaddle in a paper. And from a person(s) claiming to be a geochemist!! The more outlandish the claims these characters make to get funded the more time will expose this nonsense to be the gross exaggeration it is. In the meantime, the shell builders wont give a rodents posterior.
Yup, I used to be a geochemist. The article is bilge-water. Even at a distance of 24 years since I last practiced science, I can see what a crock that article is. Unmitigated rubbish. I nearly sprayed my coffee over my screen and keyboard. However, it is worth preserving as an exemplar of the depths to which “climate science” has sunk. The authors should be obliged to read out loud the comments on this page, then fired.
I’m 95% confident the oceans are getting more acidic or perhaps less alkaline because the weather is getting colder probably because of global warming-
http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/technology/as-the-climate-warms-it-could-actually-be-generating-more-cold-outbreaks-in-the-usa-heres-how/story-fnjww4qb-1227118716283
Or something like that but I need more grants.
http://www.ucar.edu/communications/Final_acidification.pdf
“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)”
I would not like to have the first-aider at LDEO treat me for any Acid or Alkaline burns I may get. If they do not understand the difference between the two then they need waking up!
Ocean Acidification nice scary sounding words , less base sea more accurate but a lot less scary sounding , now you pick which one to use when your seeking to ‘promote’ an outlook.
“….fallen from 8.2 to 8.1 by 0.1 pH unit, equal to a 30 percent increase in acid concentration.”.
What is not sated is that chemists do not express pH this way.
Do not be tricked into thinking that this (false) scale has only 100 percents. It has thousands of percents from one end to the other and this tiny change is close to, or even less than, the error involved in sampling and measurement.
I thought alkaline solutions were rich in OH not an hydroxyl in sigth!
http://www.int-res.com/articles/meps2002/238/m238p281.pdf
“Temperature effects on pH are relatively small. An increase of
20°C in seawater will decrease pH only by about 0.07
(at constant ppCO2 and 30‰)”
Peddlers of ocean “acidification” should be jailed for fraud or institutionalised for inadequate brain function.
All marine calcified phyla such as corals and echinoderms evolved when the atmosphere contained 20 times more CO2 than today.
I take it you’re referring to the Cambrian? Let’s have a look at the some of the major extinction events since then:
Ordovician–Silurian extinction: 450 Ma to 440 Ma. CO2: 7,000 ppm to 4,400 ppm. ***
Late Devonian extinction: 374 Ma. CO2: 2,200 ppm to 800 ppm (leading into the Carboniferous).
Permian-Triassic extinction: 252 Ma. CO2: 900 ppm to 1,750 ppm.
All three were particularly rough on corals, echinoderms, bivalves and a litany of other benthic species. The Devonian extinction pretty much only affected sea life and all but wiped out reef-building corals — which didn’t reappear until AFTER the P-T extinction sometime in the Mesozoic. Of these three, the P-T extiction was the very worst: > 95% of all marine and ~70% of terrestrial vertebrate species. Plus the only known mass extinction of insects.
If you want to oversimplify speciation/extinction as such, you may want to check first that the worst extinctions don’t coincide with CO2 trends going in the opposite direction of the point you’re attempting to make.
———
*** estimated mean concentration for each geologic period.
Brandon
Bringing in extinction events does nothing to contradict my point. It represents a (failed) attempt at “refutation by obfuscation”. My point is indeed simple – and none the worse for that. During the period of evolution and radiation of calcified marine organisms, for many tens of millions of years, CO2 levels were an order of magnitude higher than now. This “simple” fact is a complete and self-sufficient refutation of the notion that adding a few tens of ppm of CO2 to a pliocene ice house atmosphere can ib any way whatsoever threaten marine calcified organisms on the basis for instance of pH.
You bring in the big extinctions but thus does not change the above argument one iota. So some extinctions may have raised the already high CO2 levels way higher still, due to massive volcanism from continents tearing apart or a flood basalt. That does not mean that the CO2 levels outside of the extinction episodes are tarred by the same brush of harmfulness. That would be like saying “80% oxygen is lethal to humans. Therefore 20% oxygen cant be good either”.
The key ingredient of the spectacular marone extinctions was ocean anoxia. This probably resulted from complete stalling of deep ocean circulation. Excess warming would be needed for this, maybe with a CO2 involvement. However these extinctions were exceptional excursions. Remember that “the dose is the toxin”. A very high dose of caffeine or many other things will kill you. But lower doses are quite benign.
If you look at the graphic and take it at face value you can see that the ‘acidity’ of the oceans varies naturally from place to place. From the colour scale we can say that this natural variation extends at least from a pH of about 8 to a pH of 8.16. This natural variation therefore greatly overwhelms the claimed 0.1 ph unit change since the start of the industrial era.
To put it in percentage terms (although this is a stupid thing to do) some parts of the ocean are already 45% more acidic than elsewhere, depending on where you sample and obviously it doesn’t cause any problems.
It is dishonest to present to a lay audience that a reduction in alkalinity means the oceans are turning to acid. The oceans are alkaline and will always remain alkaline. A slight decrease in ph is simply a move towards neutrality.
Since there is already 70 times more CO2 dissolved in the ocean than is present in the air, if it were all to dissolve tomorrow, it would not make much difference to ‘acidity’ (but we would all die).