From NOAA’s department of acidic wordsmithing: New study shows Arctic Ocean rapidly becoming more corrosive to marine species
Chukchi and Beaufort Seas could become less hospitable to shelled animals by 2030
New research by NOAA, University of Alaska, and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in the journal Oceanography shows that surface waters of the Chukchi and Beaufort seas could reach levels of acidity that threaten the ability of animals to build and maintain their shells by 2030, with the Bering Sea reaching this level of acidity by 2044.
“Our research shows that within 15 years, the chemistry of these waters may no longer be saturated with enough calcium carbonate for a number of animals from tiny sea snails to Alaska King crabs to construct and maintain their shells at certain times of the year,” said Jeremy Mathis, an oceanographer at NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory and lead author. “This change due to ocean acidification would not only affect shell-building animals but could ripple through the marine ecosystem.”
A team of scientists led by Mathis and Jessica Cross from the University of Alaska Fairbanks collected observations on water temperature, salinity and dissolved carbon during two month-long expeditions to the Bering, Chukchi and Beaufort Seas onboard United States Coast Guard cutter Healy in 2011 and 2012.
Sampling Arctic waters
These data were used to validate a predictive model for the region that calculates the change over time in the amount of calcium and carbonate ions dissolved in seawater, an important indicator of ocean acidification. The model suggests these levels will drop below the current range in 2025 for the Beaufort Sea, 2027 for the Chukchi Sea and 2044 for the Bering Sea. “A key advance of this study was combining the power of field observations with numerical models to better predict the future,” said Scott Doney, a coauthor of the study and a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
A form of calcium carbonate in the ocean, called aragonite, is used by animals to construct and maintain shells. When calcium and carbonate ion concentrations slip below tolerable levels, aragonite shells can begin to dissolve, particularly at early life stages. As the water chemistry slips below the present-day range, which varies by season, shell-building organisms and the fish that depend on these species for food can be affected.
This region is home to some of our nation’s most valuable commercial and subsistence fisheries. NOAA’s latest Fisheries of the United States report estimates that nearly 60 percent of U.S. commercial fisheries landings by weight are harvested in Alaska. These 5.8 billion pounds brought in $1.9 billion in wholesale values or one third of all landings by value in the U.S. in 2013.
Lowering sensors
The continental shelves of the Bering, Chukchi and Beaufort Seas are especially vulnerable to the effects of ocean acidification because the absorption of human-caused carbon dioxide emissions is not the only process contributing to acidity. Melting glaciers, upwelling of carbon-dioxide rich deep waters, freshwater input from rivers and the fact that cold water absorbs more carbon dioxide than warmer waters exacerbates ocean acidification in this region.
“The Pacific-Arctic region, because of its vulnerability to ocean acidification, gives us an early glimpse of how the global ocean will respond to increased human-caused carbon dioxide emissions, which are being absorbed by our ocean,” said Mathis. “Increasing our observations in this area will help us develop the environmental information needed by policy makers and industry to address the growing challenges of ocean acidification.”
Go online here to read the research paper, Ocean Acidification in the Surface Waters of the Pacific-Arctic Boundary Regions, in Oceanography
In Warmland, when they choose a word, it means just what they choose it to mean — neither more nor less.
Went and read the paper. You know where it is going when in the intro they declare the ocean is already 30% more acidic. Well, pH is a log scale. They mean the decline from guesstimated 8.2 to measured 8.11 at station Aloha in the barren Pacific north of Hawaii. The Artic ocean is anything but barren. Deadliest Catch is pretty good evidence. Finally, they point to commercial disruption of Alaskan fisheries. But pelagic fishes, and crabs, don’t rely on calcification either directly or via their food sources. Calcification is about shellfish and corals and coccolythophorids. Arctic Shellfish (clams) are important food for walrus. Otherwise there is no big biological concern. Its a crab/fish/seal/polar bear Arctic biosphere.
The paper makes a major mistake in the tradition of AR4’s goof. The pH and aragonite saturation calculations omit the enormous buffering capacity of seawater, which for any pCO2 roughly halves the pH and carbonate saturation impact. The calculations are chemically incomplete, so wrong.
The coupled model saturation outputs for the present based on RCP 8.5 did NOT well match the water samples. See table one, and the oddles of text armwaving this little detail away. One valid reason is ‘acidic’ freshwater river inflow. Those inflows also bring additional dissolved (and undissolved) carbonate from sediment. That input detail, however, was not included.
Part of the modelled effect was less summer ice cover so more CO2 absorption so more ‘acidification’. This ignores the accompanying summer increased biological activity that would raise pH by increasing photosynthetic comsumption of pCO2. The very same logic flaw that PMEL made in drawing its scary but false conclusions about the Netarts Bay oyster hatchery. See essay Shell Games in Blowing Smoke.
About the only good thing is that we now have an October salinity, pH, and aragonite concentration baseline for these three Arctic seas. What we still do not have is the annual biologically driven pH cycle that would indicate whether shellfish spawn (a summer event when planctonic food is at the maximum) might be affected in the future. The PMEL ‘goof’ remains unadressed for the Arctic.
Excellent post ristvan. Also missing is the fact of numerous observations of improvement in calcification of disparate marine life in realistic rates of PH change due to increased CO2.
http://www.co2science.org/data/acidification/acidification.php
“In the final graphical representations of the information contained in our Ocean Acidification Database, we have plotted the averages of all responses to seawater acidification (produced by additions of both HCl and CO2) for all five of the life characteristics of the various marine organisms that we have analyzed over the five pH reduction ranges that we discuss in our Description of the Ocean Acidification Database Tables, which pH ranges we illustrate in the figure below.”
“The most striking feature of Figure 11 is the great preponderance of data located in positive territory, which suggests that, on the whole, marine organisms likely will not be harmed to any significant degree by the expected decline in oceanic pH. If anything, in fact, the results suggest that the world’s marine life may actually slightly benefit from the pH decline, which latter possibility is further borne out by the scatter plot of all the experimental data pertaining to all life characteristic categories over the same pH decline range, as shown below in Figure 12.”
At PH decline from control of .125 calcification, metabolism, fertility, growth and survival all moved into positive territory.
Their abstract does not give pH. Today’s ocean pH ranges over 7.5 to 8.4, average ~8.1. Over the period of 100 to 200 million years ago, when marine life with carbonate shells flourished and atmospheric CO2 was higher (see comments above), the average ocean pH was ~7.6.
Obviously lots of uncertainty in future extrapolations.
The paper that is discussed in this report makes no sense. Have they demonstrated any empirical data that shows the aragonite they allege is leaching out of the region would actually have the claimed impact?
Does the paper supply any data points on the removal of aragonite from the region?
Is there any paleontological evidence that in the past, with similar to higher CO2 levels, there was a shortage of shellfish?
This sounds like more pre-Paris climate hype.
With a little chemistry you could measure the calcium and carbonate ions, instead of modeling them based on pH.
Will we go blind if we keep exacerbating?
Can’t believe there’s still several months for this swindle, dishonest propaganda is over. Damn i’ll be glad when the “green” hoax -meeting in Paris has ended, perhaps at least some of the dishonest activist fools find other things to do than this dishonest crap .. Pardon my french.
Btw. do they really think people would believe this bs?
The bovine excrement is getting piled high in advance of Paris. The world’s media will be dumped on, force fed, buried in, have its nose rubbed in, and drip fed this crap for the next 6 months. Everyone here knows it’s BS. The media will have so much to choose from. Whoopee!
switched off reading at “may no longer”
.One day they may stop pumping out this rubbish.
That might depend on whether scenarios could possibly be projected to envision a modeled, or assumed response which may then indicate a likely imaginative probablity of future presumptive concepts.
The arctic ocean is becoming more corrosive.
Ionic pentameter.
You need to have your pentameter calibrated. Maybe rhymeafterrhyme can do that for ya 🙂
No way jose. I counts 5 iambs: the ARC tic O cean is be COM ing MORE cor RO sive.
Bruce Cobb: Sorry, an iamb is dit-DAH. You have either an amphibrach (“tic O cean”) followed by an anapest (“is be COM”), or else you have a quartus paeon (“cean is be COM”).
But as Tom Lehrer says, what’s “a couple extra syllables” among friends?
Ionic? Wouldn’t you prefer something a bit more ornamental?
May I suggest Corinthian? It fits the global catastrophe scenario so much better.
Or perhaps you meant “ironic bent ammeter”?
Sorry but iambic pentameter need not consist entirely of iambs (da-dums), and does not require ten syllables. Halle–Keyser rules state that only “stress maximum” syllables are important in determining the meter.
I’m fascinated by the fact that samples of ocean water were taken and the ph measured – only because, when it came to water temp measurements the difference in temp between wooden buckets and canvas buckets was enough to alter the temp measurements after the fact – sufficient to support the CO2 curse of AGW. Will later scientists conclude that, “whoops, we used the wrong kind of ph sampling devices”?
Funny, how is it every time they do research, it is always about 15 years after they perform the study that the bad effects will be seen? Mind you, there are NO bad effects being seen at this time anywhere on the planet at the moment with respect to ocean acidification by CO2. We are to believe that they just happened to do this study exactly 15 years before problems will show up. happened to get lucky and do this study exactly at this point time. Strange also how the can take one data point (based on reading the abstract) and then determine a trend. To me, they simply took a data point in order to provide “cover” for their ALL model paper.
Interesting that all those Jurassic and Cretaceous giant ammonites managed to make shells for tens of millions of years when atmospheric CO2 levels were 10-20 times the level seen today.
Also, should note, when the atmosphere was 6000ppm the oceans were not acidic, so no way they will become acidic at a mere 400ppm. This is because the ocean is a buffered system, with an enormous amount of limestone (CaCO3) deposits, which maintains the pH of the ocean at ~8.0 at equilibrium, regardless of CO2 level. Also, at constant pH, HCO3- and CO3– both increase as more CO2 is dissolved into the water.
If the oceans are becoming acidic, we could turn this to our advantage: stick in a couple of big ol’ lead terminals, and we would have a huge battery.
Or would that be a salton battery…
Isn’t Palau already at the levels they predict? I was reading (here I believe) that the lagoon has a higher alkalinity that the surrounding area and already has concentrates as high as they predict…it also doesn’t show the issues they predict. Hmmmm, conundrum that….
Clif, its lower alkalinity. Palau was about tropical corals. This is about Arctic clams. Despite GLOBAL Warming. Don’t you get it? /sarc.
The abstract said the Arctic is the canary in the coal mine.
What the paper did not say is that the canary’s presently singing loudly and happily, and that only a pause falsified single climate model whose outputs for the present did NOT match the gathered water samples predicts the poor canary might have a scratchy throat in a few decades.
Speaking of US government agencies…whatever became of the data from NASA’s “Orbiting CO2 Observatory”? Didn’t the first first snapshot of earth show uneven distribution of CO2 around the earth and heavier concentrations inconveniently placed? 5 will get you 20 that they’re trying to figure out how to spin the data otherwise they would have jumped on “convenient” data immediately. Has it been 6 months?
Headline: Deadly Ocean Neutralisation Threatens Crabs!
We’ll All Be Rooned!
“These data were used to validate a predictive model for the region that calculates the change over time in the amount of calcium and carbonate ions dissolved in seawater, an important indicator of ocean acidification.”
The oceans have heartburn? Tum-ta-tum-tum-TUMS!!!
CO2 is bad, Bad, BAD for all living things. Except that it is necessary for all living things to live. Hmmmm, I’m lost again.
If surface temperatures don’t skyrocket soon, expect to hear a lot in the coming months about “ocean acidification.” This sounds scary, and that is the point of emphasizing it in the runup to Paris COP.
https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2015/06/17/basics-of-ocean-acidification/
I am off the opinion that the evidence available “could possibly indicate” that somebody somewhere is sitting with a pile of dubious papers and writing media releases for them before drip feeding them to selected journals to be published in the lead up to Paris. This one has been sitting on the pile for a while but they needed to push the message about Arctic fisheries being threatened so it was given a starting position on the grid. It seems to me “it is possible” that there is a coordinated effort to manipulate public and political opinion prior to forcing through damaging agreements in Paris. If they cannot get something in Paris the game is up and the whole house of cards will come falling down.
What I laughed at was the vast amount of data that backs up their model: Two month-long trips.
Considering the great shifts the arctic goes through, year to year (not to mention MWP to LIA), a couple of summer trips is too little data to determine much of anything.
However they set out looking for specific data, to “validate” their models.
Does that make anyone else cringe a little?
There seems to be a pattern here. Perhaps the gavinator has a schedule for the weekly release of bad science?
Throw enough BS at the gullible and they’ll give up and want alarmist success? Not likely. But since the gavinator believes skeptics are beneath him; it certainly is likely the gavinator underestimates a huge majority of free thinking citizens.
[snip insulting comment, name calling -mod]