Ocean Acidification

I recently stumbled upon something that I had not heard of before called “Ocean Acidification”. It was something that I had no idea about but after reading a few articles on it I was hooked. One article I read that can be found here http://ocean.si.edu/ocean-acidification called it “climate change’s equally evil twin”. (Bennett) A basic summary of it is that it is a “significant and harmful consequence of excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and we normally don’t even see it coming because its effects are happening under water.” (Bennett) The ocean is absorbing an excess amount of CO2. Scientist thought that it may have been a good thing at first because it was leaving less CO2 in the air but have learned that it is costing the ocean dearly by changing its chemistry. A number that really stood out to me was that in the past 200 years, ocean water has become thirty percent more acidic… wow. A cool video that kind of explains a little bit more about ocean acidification and the impacts of it can be found here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wo-bHt1bOsw. Ocean acidification impacts many things, some of which include coral reefs, oysters, mussels, urchins, starfish and basically anything found in the ocean. Acidic oceans affect the development of ocean creatures, especially ones with shells as the added acidification cause shell building problems. I’m definitely interested in learning more about what ocean acidification actually is as I have only scratched the basic surface. I’m also interested in learning how we could better cut carbon emissions in the future in order to help stop or at least slow down the process of ocean acidification. From what I have gathered, a few of the things that we as humans can do now is to just try and lower our daily carbon dioxide use. Recycle, turn off unused lights, walk/bike instead of driving and really just supporting clean energy as much as possible are all things we can work on now to slow this down. Ocean acidification isn’t something I had ever heard of but is something that I think is important to be educated about after reading up on it and is something I would love to research more.

3 thoughts on “Ocean Acidification

  1. This is very interesting because I have never heard of Ocean Acidification either. Reading this article made me begin to think about all of the oil spills and also the overconsumption of seafood in people’s diets and too many fish being caught by fisherman. With acidification, oil spills, and fish being killed to eat or caught for leisure, the ocean is drastically losing it’s marine life. Great blog post.

  2. This is a very scary thought. I hope that with time we will be able to do more than just reduce emissions in order to combat this phenomenon and turn the tides.

  3. Thank-you so much for sharing this, Reid! We’ll talk a little bit about ocean acidification when we get to global climate change. It is something we need to pay close attention to, particularly as so many people rely on the oceans as a source of food and income.

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