Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Dr. Heidi Burdett has published a study which claims intense CO2 shocks cause starfish and coraline algae to dissolve. The study has implications for siting carbon capture and storage facilities.
Carbon dioxide ‘pulses’ threaten Scotland’s coralline algal reefs
Scotland’s marine ecosystems may be more sensitive to carbon dioxide than previously thought, and could be damaged irreparably by the CO2 ‘pulses’ created by industrial activities, land run off or natural tidal processes.
…
Dr Heidi Burdett, a research fellow at Heriot-Watt University’s Lyell Centre for Earth and Marine Science and Technology, said: “Coralline algal ecosystems can be found in all the world’s coastal oceans and are particularly common along the west coast of Scotland. Since coralline algae are highly calcified, we knew they would probably be quite sensitive to CO2.
“These beds have significant ecological and economical value: in Scotland, they act as nurseries for important catches like scallops, cod and pollock.
“We found that there was a rapid, community-level shift to net dissolution, meaning that within that community, the skeletons of calcifying organisms like star fish and coralline algae were dissolving.
“If you think of pulses of carbon dioxide being carried on the tide to a particular site, it’s like a flash flood of CO2.
“Our continued monitoring of the site directly after the CO2 exposure found recovery was comparably slow, which raises concern about the ability of these systems to ‘bounce back’ after repeated acute CO2 events.”
…
“If a local authority or government agency is deciding the location of a new fish farm, forestry or carbon capture site, we should be looking at what marine ecosystems are nearby, and the potential for those ecosystems to be impacted by the new activities as a whole, rather than focusing on the impact on individual organisms.
…
Read more: https://www.hw.ac.uk/about/news/carbon-dioxide-pulses-threaten-scotland-s.htm
The abstract of the study;
Community-level sensitivity of a calcifying ecosystem to acute in situ CO2 enrichment
Heidi L. Burdett, Gabriela Perna, Lucy McKay, Gemma Broomhead, Nicholas A. Kamenos
ABSTRACT: The rate of change in ocean carbonate chemistry is a vital determinant in the magnitude of effects observed. Benthic marine ecosystems are facing an increasing risk of acute CO2 exposure that may be natural or anthropogenically derived (e.g. engineering and industrial activities). However, our understanding of how acute CO2 events impact marine life is restricted to individual organisms, with little understanding for how this manifests at the community level. Here, we investigated in situ the effect of acute CO2 enrichment on the coralline algal ecosystem—a globally ubiquitous, ecologically and economically important habitat, but one which is likely to be sensitive to CO2 enrichment due to its highly calcified reef-like structures engineered by coralline algae. Most notably, we observed a rapid community-level shift to favour net dissolution rather than net calcification. Smaller changes from net respiration to net photosynthesis were also observed. There was no effect on the net flux of DMS/DMSP (algal secondary metabolites), nor on the nutrients nitrate and phosphate. Following return to ambient CO2 levels, only a partial recovery was seen within the monitoring timeframe. This study highlights the sensitivity of biogenic carbonate marine communities to acute CO2 enrichment and raises concerns over the capacity for the system to ‘bounce back’ if subjected to repeated acute high-CO2 events.
Read more (Paywalled): http://www.int-res.com/abstracts/meps/v587/p73-80/
Sadly the study is paywalled, so we don’t get to learn how CO2 enriched the test water was. If Heidi was attempting to simulate an industrial release or maybe a volcanic eruption, the answer is likely “quite a lot”.
There are studies which suggest many calciferous organisms are highly resistant to elevated CO2. Some calciferous species have demonstrated the ability to control the acidity of their immediate environment, regardless of external influences – particularly corals which live in highly variable coastal environments.
It is interesting Heidi mentioned carbon capture sites as a possible risk to coastal ecosystems.
I’m not a fan of carbon capture. An abrupt volcanic CO2 release from Lake Nyos in 1986 killed people up to sixteen miles from the source of the release. Thankfully Lake Nyos was a sparsely inhabited region.
The amount of CO2 released in the Lake Nyos disaster was comparable to the amount of CO2 produced by a medium size coal plant in a month. There are thousands of medium size coal plants in the world, and some very big coal plants. Concentrating CO2 on a large scale is dangerous – the scale of CO2 concentration required for a serious global carbon capture effort would in my opinion ensure someone, somewhere would cut one corner too many. A Lake Nyos scale release near a major city could kill millions of people.
All the more reason why CO2 should be allowed to stay in the atmosphere, and not buried in deep mines or deep ocean trenches. At least in the atmosphere it will do good.
Just a typical garbage abstract- contains no explicit statement of method and results.
Disagree, first sentence.
IT’S WORSE THAN WE THOUGHT.
Worse than we guessed. No thinking involved.
Bingo. The first three sentences don’t even belong in an abstract, they belong in a grant proposal. Then they continue to waste valuable abstract space and can’t even hint at any methodology.
They do hint at results, however, but they are very confusing — “Most notably, we observed a rapid community-level shift to favour net dissolution rather than net calcification.” They observed community level shift to favour net dissolution rather than net calcification. Observed favouring net dissolution? Did they ask the red algae what was favored or did they actually observe the dissolution of living organisms?
Strange, that an algae class that is often important in bioerosion of reefs using acids to bore into other calcifiers is sensitive to acute natural CO2 changes. Given that marine calcifiers utilize biomineralization and have several different processes of protecting their shells from pH changes, the calcite sediment without anything to protect it must have vanished into solution before their very eyes /s.
On the Looney-Tunes scale, CCS ranks right up there with all the various Geo-engineering schemes.
I liked the part best where they said that the ecosystem “could be damaged irreparably by the CO2 ‘pulses’ created by … natural tidal processes.”
Right. The ecosystem could be damaged irreparably by natural tidal processes … do these folks not have Editors? Never mind, I don’t want to know …
w.
The world-view that sees man and his activities as entirely unnatural is amusing, to say the least.
I wonder how long an ecological ‘green’ beaver would last.
Leo,
On a related theme, you may be amused to hear the old nickname of Herriot-Watt University is “Hairy Tw*t*. Quite a coincidence it seems.
Yes, Willis, Eric and co, I agree that we shouldn’t drag this site into the gutter with such comments. In my defence, however, this paper belongs in the gutter. I’d have liked to see some real life examples of how anthropogenic CO2 had caused such devastating effects. I suspect, however, that they don’t exist and never will.
Not sure if this is OK on WUWT and the technicality is a bit above my pay-grade, but the full paper can be found here… http://sci-hub.hk/http://www.int-res.com/articles/meps2017/587/m587p073.pdf
from reading the paper they bubbled co2 into the water and measured caco3 precipitation over a day or two to determine that the organisms were losing shell.
this seems flawed to me because they did not appear to run a control to see if adding co2 would causes caco3 to precipitate without any. marine organisms present.
additionally the experiment only ran for 80 hours total. this is hardly sufficient to judge how the organisms will adapt to environmental changes. many organisms adapt via changes to the next. generation which means testing over months and years.
What they did was jack the pH around for four days….add CO2 to lower pH, and do it fast enough the buffers can’t keep up…..everytime they stopped, the pH would bounce right back to normal almost immediately
Oh my, it’s worse than we thought:
In summary, they took water samples during the “experiment” and performed some simple carbonate chemistry analyses on them, and they discovered that lowering the pH of water will reduce precipitation rates of inorganic CaCO3 precipitation. Then in true climastrology fashion, they pretended that this reduced CaCO3 saturation states translates into reduced organic CaCO3 biomineralization.
100% pure unadulterated junk science.
Algae which do not like CO2? On what planet?
I saw this nonsense on BBC this morning and almost cracked up! I was minded to lodge yet another complaint about their single-minded pursuit of alarmist drivel but I’ve found from repeated attempts that it’s a waste of time and effort!
On another note, though, ion the spirit of technical accuracy, it’s worth pointing out that the deaths caused by the Lake Nyos event involved not just CO2 but also H2S, another gas associated with volcanic activity and an altogether more dangerous material than CO2. The deaths would probably have still occurred by asphyxiation as the gases poured from the crater lake but H2S (which has a toxicity akin to hydrogen cyanide) certainly contributed to the horrendous outcome. Anyway, just a comment….
Hello Phil.
Your comment about H2S at Lake Nyos is of interest. Can you provide any more information or references?
H2S is heavier than air and is instantly lethal to humans in concentrations of 0.1% or even less.
Thank you, Allan
May be the understatement of the year.
Not only that, Phil, but the statement that a CO2 spill near a major city could result in millions of deaths is highly exaggerated. Lake Nyos is a crater lake in a volcano. It is very deep & highly stratified. There was a de-stratification event, in which the lake waters burped out huge quantities of gas. This occurred in the dead of night, & the gases flowed down the mountain, like water pouring out of a jug, killing people as they slept. This could only have happened on a still night, which kept the gases from being diluted by turbulence. The fact it happened in rural Africa, where people probably sleep closer to the ground than we westerners do, would have increased the death toll. See the article on WUWT about the Gates of Hell in Turkey.
“only a partial recovery was seen within the monitoring timeframe”
Aye, we watches the poor wee thingies all day, but they had’ne recovered much at all when we had to go in for our tea.
It was also only a four day experiment, with the abstract not specifying how long each phase lasted.
A classic ruse in many fields is to either cut the experiment short in order to avoid reporting unwanted data, or extending it almost without limit until some ‘random’ event produces the data you want.
They also note a change from “net respiration to net photosynthesis” during the experiment, but consider this to only be a minor change!
“net respiration to net photosynthesis” – that would be day and night, wouldn’t it?
Like the experiment that Griff pointed out last year that determined elevated CO2 levels were actually bad for tapioca plants? That’s true, if you put them in a container nowhere big enough to grow a tapioca plant, they reach the stage of determining that the sight that they are growing is unsuitable faster.
How do they measure the difference between natural tidal action and Co2 damage?
It seems ‘climate scientists’ are back to their previous similar level of dumping creatures in concentrated acid and going OMG CO2 will kill them all.
If carbon capture ever does go wrong, it’ll probably be 1000’s of people that get suffocated, never mind the starfish.
Give me a few squirts of CO2 over a prolonged period and I will probably “cark it” also.
Same applies for nitrogen, argon and any other gas or vapour you may wish to conjure up.
4 x 28L benthic chambers imbedded @ 6m. Seawater circulated @ 120 l/h via the surface where it was enriched with CO2. 3 phases 15h ambient. 28h enrichment. 37h post enrichment. Sampled at intervals + continuous measurement. Seems good enough but no control chamber as a baseline.
What concentration did they get to? It changes tremendously if it’s 1000 ppm versus 10%.
but no control chamber as a baseline.
=========
exactly. they did not rule out inorganic chemistry as the cause of their results.
Worse, they did the inorganic chemistry calculations and then applied that to the living organisms as if they were literally dissolving and had actually observed this, but there is no indication that they literally observed any dissolution of any organism but plenty of weasel words to make it sound like they did.
I don’t have the time to follow the junk science trail –especially when they are citing themselves– but citing other studies and then assuming those results apply to your observations (that you didn’t actually make) isn’t even a stretch in claiming reproducing science, it’s fraud.
Here are the calculations that they based their “observations” on.
Ambient CO2 / enrichment period / Recovery conditions
Temperature (°C) 15.3±0.32 15.3±0.32 15.3±0.32
Salinity 33.0±0.38 33.0±0.38 33.0±0.38
Max PAR (µmol 158 158 158
photons m–2 s–1)
AT (µmol kg–1) 2190.7±87.2 2202.0±123.28 2210.8±68.2
CT (µmol kg–1) 2084.8±12.8 2168.9±31.20 2066.2±23.2
pHNBS 7.9±0.2 7.7±0.39 8.0±0.2
pCO2 (µatm) 821.6±343.4 1747.7±1403.33 646.7±320.6
HCO3
– (µmol kg–1) 1961.1±27.5 2033.5±20.35 1927.6±49.2
CO3
2– (µmol kg–1) 92.0±45.9 67.8±50.77 113.5±45.5
ΩArg 1.4±0.7 1.0±0.78 1.7±0.7
How about that precision on their enriched CO2, 300 ppm-6,000 ppm. What condition are they testing for, volcanic eruption?
If there was a control chamber it is not alluded to in the paper as far as I can tell.
Seems like a rush to spend the grant money before the well runs dry.
Atmospheric CO2 does affect the aragonite saturation state of sea water…
And this does affect marine calcifers to varying degrees…
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/24/chicken-little-of-the-sea-visits-station-aloha/
David, how in this world does CO2 affect aragonite?….CO2 might effect the pH if buffers run out….but there’s no danger buffers like aragonite will ever run out
how in this world does CO2 affect aragonite?…
======
adding co2 to the oceans causes caco3 to. precipitate as limestone. this limestone is carried by plate tectonics into the earth where it is reduced by iron to produce natural gas.
this natural gas bubbles up into the oceans and atmosphere where it is oxidized by living organisms as a source. of energy. this process. has been ongoing for hundreds. of millions of years.
ferd…..CO2 is what makes aragonite
It affects the saturation state of both aragonite and calcite. Although aragonite is far more sensitive.
http://ww2.odu.edu/~jrule/geo514/chapter6.pdf
Increasing atmospheric CO2 also causes the carbonate compensation depth (lysocline) to become somewhat shallower. This is the depth below which carbonates won’t precipitate.
David, the study you linked “assumed”….CO2 can only do that by affecting pH…CO2 by itself can not displace anything
CO2 with magnesium, you get aragonite
CO2 without magnesium, you get calcite
Aragonite and calcite are two crystalline forms of calcium carbonate. Once they dissolve, there is no way of telling whether it was an aragonite or a calcite that had dissolved.
aragonite is more soluble
CO2 and a lot of other factors affect pH…
pH decreases with depth. The depth at which carbonates will no longer precipitate is called the carbonate compensation depth. Below this depth carbonates will dissolve.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbonate_compensation_depth
http://www.sepmstrata.org/page.aspx?pageid=358
One of the geologic markers of the PETM is clear evidence of a shoaling of the lysocline. https://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/01/10/ocean-acidification-chicken-of-the-sea-little-strikes-again/
During periods of very high CO2 levels, the seas have been calcitic. During periods of low CO2, like the Pennsylvanian-Permian and Oligocene-Holocene, the seas have been aragonitic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aragonite_sea
Marine calcifers adjust. Some adjust better than others. Coralline algae adjust very well.
correct…but the only effect CO2 has is pH…
Like you just said….coralline adjusts fairly easily to fluctuating calcium and carbonates…..it does not adjust well to rapidly fluctuating pH…and that’s exactly what they did in this study at the top of this post…they jerked the pH around for 4 days
David, Low Mg Calcite/High Mg Calcite,Aragonite has nothing to do with pCO2. It has everything to do with Mg:Ca ratios in seawater as well as temperature and individual organism.
http://earthdynamics.org/papers-ED/in-press/2013-Muller-etal-Geology-AIP.pdf
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.559.66&rep=rep1&type=pdf
Question for D. Middleton re the top graph MLO CO2 vs Aragonite Saturation: Is that blue blot in the upper left corner an ink blot, or the data points from which the nonlinear regression line was extrapolated? If the latter, there are statisticians who should be weighing in. My stats profs warned me to never try that at home, or anywhere else. There are limited exceptions (hydrology), but this does not appear to be one of them.
Those are the measured aragonite saturation data from Station Aloha (Hawaii Ocean Time Series). The the red curve is the relationship between CO2 and aragonite saturation from Ries et al., 2009. I just applied the same type of trend line function to the real data that Ries modeled.
Aragonite and calcite saturation is a function of DIC CO3 2-, HCO3 – and atmospheric CO2.
My point was to demonstrate that the measured reduction in aragonite saturation at Station Aloha was much less than indicated in Ries.
Don’t you mean CO2? and temp? Acidity increases with temperature mate
A lot of factors affect carbonate saturation state…
http://www.sepmstrata.org/page.aspx?pageid=358
A massive starfish die-off has been ongoing along the US west coast from Mexico to Alaska since late 2013. Nobody knows why. I’m surprised it’s still happening.
Sea star wasting disease among worst wildlife die-offs say scientists
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/sea-star-wasting-die-off-1.3414607
The problem at Lake Nyos purportedly wasn’t CO2 toxicity — which is unclear, but is thought to be quite low — but the fact that the CO2 displaced a large percentage of the oxygenated air in the enclosed basin. That may have been exacerbated by the presence of strongly toxic gases like HS and H2S in the gas cloud. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Nyos_disaster
Assuming Wikipedia is correct, and it likely is, Lake Nyos would seem to have little relevance to marine algae.
Ooops. make that SO2 and H2S. Too early and I’ve never been much good at proofreading.
The deaths at Lake Nyos were likely caused by a downhill flow of gases replacing the breathable air. It also occurred at night when most were sleeping, probably on low pallets. Many may have survived if standing, which could have put their heads above the flow. A gas flow, while not being obvious, will not knock you about like a water flow does.
This event makes me think of the Permian Extinction — an H2S signature all over the planet and more marine organisms going extinct than land organisms.
“If a local authority or government agency is deciding the location of a new fish farm, forestry or carbon capture site, we should be looking at what marine ecosystems are nearby, and the potential for those ecosystems to be impacted by the new activities as a whole, rather than focusing on the impact on individual organisms.”
I would think that is a prudent thing to do any time an agency is deciding on the location of a project, but especially if it is a government project.
A PhD study gives a ‘still’ picture of an ecology that changes ever so slowly. These industrial cities had a heck of a lot of coal burning plus sulphuric acid rain for two centuries. The fact the reefs are still operating and providing a nest for fish and shellfish tells us that these systems are “…robustly resistant to the lesser damaging reagents they are exposed to these days” (quote from crotchety geologist/mining engineer who rants here quite frequently).
For ‘climate’ the best qualification is to have lived for a heck of a long time (It doesn’t work for all, e.g. The Shipper of Fools types). Axel Morner is the guy I go to for sea level insights, for example.
The standard practice among researchers is not to bother with CO2, but add hydrochloric acid to water instead.
Simple solution.
Forget about carbon capture and storage.
It isn’t needed anyway.
‘the scale of CO2 concentration required for a serious global carbon capture effort would in my opinion ensure someone, somewhere would cut one corner too many. A Lake Nyos scale release near a major city could kill millions of people.”
Eric:
Carbon dioxide kills in a manner similar to water. A major release would be little different from a major dam break. I suspect the incidences would be at least as rare and would cause much less property damage or death from reasons other than asphyxiation.
That said I cannot escape the absurdity of storing large amounts of CO2 to keep an infinitely small amount of the gas out of the atmosphere. Storage only restricts access to natural mechanisms that remove it quite rapidly.
Here is hoping that CO2 will also cause lobster to dissolve — cracking those open is a drag.
This is a study described as “Here, we investigated in situ the effect of acute CO2 enrichment on the coralline algal ecosystem” — the key is the word acute.
In situ means that they put an enclosure of some kind over an area in the sea. “Acute CO2 enrichment” means that pumped in some amount of CO2 never expected to occur naturally in that environment.
I have written to the author and requested a copy of the paper and SI — if she responds favorably, I’ll write it up for publication here.
indeed. starfish may not move very fast, but they can’t move at all in an enclosure.
Global warming is SO 1990’s. Even global weirding is old. The new term should be Intense CO2 shocks. That’ll scare ’em.
According to the article, the experiment consisted of three phases: “(1) before CO2 enrichment at ambient (control) conditions (15 h), (2) during CO2 enrichment (28 h), and (3) post-enrichment recovery (37 h).”
The unperturbed in situ pH was 7.9±0.2; the pH during CO2 enrichment was 7.7±0.39, and during recovery was 8.0±0.2. These pH values are identical within one standard deviation.
The major change was in the carbonate equilibrium system, and those changes are not particularly large. Here are the data:
_______________________Ambient______Enrichment______Recovery
p CO2 (μatm)____________821.6±343.4___1747.7±1403.33__646.7±320.6
Bicarbonate (μmol kg^-1)__1961.1±27.5___2033.5±20.35___1927.6±49.2
Carbonate (μmol kg^-1)_____92.0±45.9____67.8±50.77_____113.5±45.5
Calcification (μmol m^2 hr^-1)_0.055±0.03___-0.01±0.02_____0.02±0.04
Calcification was read off Figure 1.
Dissolved CO2 approximately doubled (no surprise there). Bicarbonate increased modestly, and carbonate decreased.
But pH didn’t move materially.
So, whatever caused the coral dissolution, it was not caused by a decrease in alkalinity following dissolved [CO2] increase.
It’s truly amazing that the starfish survived during the time a lot of atmospheric CO2 was in the ocean.
More junk science
In view of the evolution of all calcified phyla – corals, molluscs, echinoderms etc. during the Cambrian era when CO2 levels were 10-30,000 ppm: how do they expect anyone with an IQ larger than their show size to believe this infantile nonsense about stress to marine calcified organisms during a glacial period with low CO2 – only a few hundred ppm? Sorry – this just baffles me.
shoe size
Some truth re organisms that live in the extremes in nature, they are the organisms that most often have the least tolerance to changes because their niche at an extreme, in ocean water context, the high end of the pH and kDH\hardness scale.
Also you won’t find studies on organisms that benefit from some acidity, like many Amazon species of fish, some of which cannot reproduce if their reproductive organs get calcified.
Extremes? Like all those volcanic hydrothermal vents around the coast of Scotland 🏴 , you mean? Please elaborate.
Anyone any idea of the total sulfur\sulfide inputs into the oceans, seem this study’s author didn’t bother to wonder about it
This whole study looks like a joke – up there with bogus papers like “The Conceptual Phallus”.
What a world, what a world…
Thanks to MarkMcD, I’ve read the full text of the article by H.Burdett et al. They bubbled CO2 in a mixing chamber and measured the concentrations of dissolved CO2, bicarbonate, and carbonate ions under ambient, CO2-enrichment, and recovery phase conditions. The fact that carbon dioxide addition favors “net dissolution rather the net calcification” is obvious for anyone familiar with school chemistry:
CaCO3 + CO2 + H2O –> Ca(HCO3)2 (soluble).
The authors found also that in recovery period p CO2 is even less, and pH and carbonate ion concentration are slightly larger than under ambient conditions. In this regard, it’s generally unclear what is a danger from CO2 to marine organisms and does it relate to real conditions in seawater.
Aleks, calcification is an energy-driven biological process. Organismal CaCO3 does not directly respond to pH in an equilibrium chemistry sense.
Also, the calcareous surfaces are typically coated with protein, so the CaCO3 doesn’t directly contact the water in any case.
So, is it necessary to consider CO2 (or H3O+) interaction with protein?
Yes, and no.
Many calcifying organisms (probably not all) don’t actually rely on the supersaturation of calcite or aragonite (crystal forms of Calcium carbonate) to create solid carbonate from solution. They actually cause precipitation of carbonate in localised micro-environments where the living organism itself controls the acidity and salt concentrations, plus specialized proteins that catalyze the precipitation process. This makes sense when you consider that many calcifying life-forms live in environments where the conditions do not favour precipitation of carbonates, but they still do it.
The ‘dissolving coral reef’ stories are usually based solely on a high school understanding of carbonate chemistry which is not relevant to the real world.