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The ocean is developing osteoporosis.

Tonight I went to a talk by Richard Feely, “Global Warming and Ocean Acidification: Double Trouble for Marine Ecosystems” (he didn’t look so Office Space in person). I heard about it randomly, and missed the first half of it, but it was enough to make me feel some eco-anxiety. I’ve read about ocean acidification before, but right now I’m thinking about the long term effects and it doesn’t look so good.

So, humans are putting lots of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Therefore, the equilibrium of atmospheric CO2 to oceanic CO2 is out of whack, and the ocean is absorbing CO2 from the atmosphere. This is a slow process, since it takes, oh, 1000 years for a complete circulation of the oceans.

“A new international study led by NOAA scientists sampled ocean water in thousands of places around the world and discovered that the seas have absorbed almost half of the 244 billion metric tons of CO2 that humans have released in the last two centuries. These heightened CO2 levels are making the oceans more acidic than they’ve likely been in several million years.” (Grist)

The CO2 reacts with the sea water (chemistry), but the end result is less available carbonate, which is that many sea creatures, many of them very wee, some less so, like corals, need to make their shells.

The part that speaks specifically, frighteningly, to Cascadians, is that things like coccolithophores which won’t be able to make their shells, are eaten by things like pteropods, which are eaten by fish, like salmon or pollock.

Not only is climate change contributing to desertification, which will have definitive effects on the subsistence agriculture of the equatorial latitudes, it’s also going to screw us on the major food sources from the ocean. I guess the scientists were onto something.