How robust is Marine Life Rise when if has to live in an acid environment?
Experts worry that plankton, coral and shellfish will struggle to survive as greenhouse gas emissions change their environment. Just think about it, marine life has evolved in a highly stable environment for millennia. Fresh water and estuarine species are able to withstand change but marine life has not evolved in a variable environment and there is a high likelihood that it will not be able to cope big changes. The really big change it is facing is much higher levels of dissolved CO2 producing Carbonic acid. Acid dissolves shells and hard skeletons of shellfish, plankton and coral
Scientists conducting a major survey of the North American Pacific coast have found that in some parts of the ocean these increases are happening much faster than predicted. The change seen in the surveys was not expected until 2050. That will seriously reduce the productivity of the entire food chain, changing ocean ecology and leading potentially to drastic reductions in fish stocks.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change also flagged ocean acidification as a problem in its fourth assessment report in 2007. Higher greenhouse gas emissions lead to more acid seas because around half the CO2 humans produce is soaked up by the oceans. In the new research, Richard Feeley at the US government agency the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and his colleagues sampled ocean chemistry from central Canada to northern Mexico. They found acidic water much closer to the surface than expected. The results are reported in the journal Science.
Upwelling acidic water is going to intermittently flood into our productive shallow seas and would be corrosive to some marine creatures. That does not mean that species will immediately die, but it does mean they have to use huge amounts of energy just to maintain their shells. The great concern is the speed of the changes. “Marine species may not have time to adapt.”
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