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Is the Acidic Ocean Dissolving the Ocean's Floor?

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Is the Acidic Ocean Dissolving the Ocean's Floor?

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From heat waves to severe storms and wildfires, the effects of climate change are visible all around us - and new research suggests that the impact of a warming world extends all the way to the bottom of the ocean.

A study published Oct. 29 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that high levels of carbon dioxide - the heat-trapping greenhouse gas that is a key contributor to Earth's warming climate - have made parts of the North Atlantic Ocean and the Southern Ocean so acidic that the chalky white mineral that makes up the seafloor is dissolving.

No one ventured to the seafloor to conduct the study. Instead, researchers led by Olivier Sulpis, a graduate student at McGill University in Montreal, simulated seafloor conditions in a laboratory. The simulations showed that the mineral, a form of calcium carbonate known as calcite, is being replaced by murky brown sediments.

Calcite is made of the skeletons and shells of marine organisms laid down over millions of years, and its loss would represent more than an aesthetic matter. The mineral acts as a chemical buffer, neutralizing the carbonic acid that forms when carbon dioxide seeps from the atmosphere into the ocean. The reaction helps prevent runaway acidification of seawater.

But with cars and factories spewing so much carbon dioxide spewing into the atmosphere, the scientists say, the calcite can't keep up. As a result, the oceans are becoming more acidic.

Ocean acidification is bad news for sea creatures. Roughly 250 million years ago, during the Permian-Triassic Extinction Event, unusually acidic oceans drove more than 90 percent of marine species to extinction. "It seems that we are at the dawn of one of these catastrophic events, and we don't need to look far to find the cause of it," Sulpis told NBC News MACH in an email.

Not everyone is particularly worried about the depletion of calcite.

Wallace Broecker, a Columbia University climate scientist who was not involved in the new study, said in an email that it "greatly overplays" the calcite problem. The dissolving of calcite "occurs naturally on a large scale in the deep sea," he said. "A tiny bit more will have no consequence."

Sulpis said the slow depletion of calcite matters, in part because it's unlikely to end anytime soon. Even if emissions of carbon dioxide ended today, he said, it would take centuries for the excess CO2 to stop dissolving the seafloor.

Then there's the stark realization that humanity's effect on our environment is disturbingly pervasive. As Sulpis put it, "Even at places on our planet where we have never set foot, or that have never been seen by human eyes, such as the deep sea, there is a trace of human activity."

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Climate change may be dissolving the ocean floor. Here's why we should be worried.

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From heat waves to severe storms and wildfires, the effects of climate change are visible all around us - and new research suggests that the impact of a warming world extends all the way to the bottom of the ocean. A study published Oct.

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But after its first month of observations, the Ocean Cleanup team has found that while the plastic is entering the system as expected, at least some of it is escaping after a relatively short time. Though the team is yet to pin down the source of problem, they see a couple of distinct possibilities. The system needs to travel faster than the plastic it is trying to collect, but it has been concluded that it is currently moving too slow, and at times is even outpaced by the plastic it is trying to catch.

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The Ocean Cleanup Project moves to fix leaks in its first plastic-catching system

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With the Ocean Cleanup Project's first system entering service in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch one month ago, there are some good signs and some bad, including an apparent inability of the huge floating barrier to retain plastic trash for very long after it is caught.

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SIX THINGS TO DO TODAY TO STOP PLASTIC OCEAN POLLUTION

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SIX THINGS TO DO TODAY TO STOP PLASTIC OCEAN POLLUTION

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SAN FRANCISCO - Plastic trash is entering the world's oceans at a rate of as much as 12.7 million metric tons a year, fouling the waters and harming marine life. But there are easy, concrete steps you can take today to limit the amount of plastic that reaches the sea, say experts.

The lion's share of plastic waste that ends up in the oceans comes from Asian countries. According to one 2015 study, the United States is responsible for just 0.9% of the world's mismanaged plastic waste.

But Americans are uniquely placed to change the way the world deals with plastic, because of the outsized importance of our economy and our ability to get companies to change their practices, said Aimee David, director of ocean conservation policy strategies at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in Monterey, Calif.

The choices Americans make have tremendous impacts globally by pushing businesses - many of them U.S. brands - to make changes that can then be implemented around the world, she said. Already business have gone from sponsoring beach cleanups to changing the design of their products as consumers being to demand alternatives.

"We were the ones that adopted a single-use, disposable lifestyle before anyone else did, and we exported it. I think now we are likely to be the ones to adopt change faster than anyone else," she said.

Six things

- Try to use less single-use disposable plastic. Whether it's bringing a cup to your local coffee place to declining a straw, or keeping reusable grocery bags in your car and using a refillable water bottle at the gym, keeping things out of the waste stream is the best way to stop plastic pollution.

- Be a selective consumer. Choose products that come with less plastic packaging, even if they're a little bit more expensive or a little less convenient.

- Give businesses you patronize positive feedback every time you see them making an effort to use less plastic. That will give them more incentive to push their suppliers for items with less plastic packaging.

- Take part in a beach cleanup in your area.

- If you do have to use single-use plastic, make sure it makes it into recycling or the trash.

- Take the time to cut the loops on anything that might entangle marine life before you throw it away, including six-pack strings and packing straps for boxes of printer paper, etc.
More: More: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch Where did the trash in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch come from? How do we stop it?

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6 things you can do to stop plastic pollution today

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SAN FRANCISCO - Plastic trash is entering the world's oceans at a rate of as much as 12.7 million metric tons a year, fouling the waters and harming marine life. But there are easy, concrete steps you can take today to limit the amount of plastic that reaches the sea, say experts.

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The Cleanup of the Pacific Garbage Patch

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The Cleanup of the Pacific Garbage Patch

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Latest News

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CLOSE

SAN FRANCISCO - Cleaning up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, estimated to contain as much as 142 thousand tons of plastic garbage spread over an area that coversa million square miles, is no small task. But it starts with scooping up two white plastic crates, some plastic bottles and five discarded commercial fishing nets.

That was the first trash captured by a 2,000-foot floating boom hauled deep into the middle of the Pacific Ocean in the middle of October by The Ocean Cleanup, a Dutch nonprofit project aimed at clearing out the ever-growing accumulation of plastic trash that collects mid-ocean. How successful it will be remains to be seen, but the effort has captured the public's imagination.

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The passive system involves a floating series of connected 4-foot booms that form a giant horseshoe at the surface of the ocean.Below that hangs a 9-foot skirt that corrals the tiny pieces of plastic trash that float in the water. The action of the currents and waves push trash into the system's center while the micro-plastic, as it's called, is captured by the hanging barrier.

"That was just the first test, of course, the plastic we collected in the first five days for scientific purposes. We wanted to make sure the system was working correctly," said Francesco Ferrari, the nonprofit's environmental monitoring coordinator.

The Ocean Cleanup system deployed in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch to sweep up plastic trash at the ocean's surface. (Photo: Ocean Cleanup)

The hope is that the device, the first of a planned fleet of 60 or more, can strain out the millions of pounds of plastic trash that collects in slow-moving ocean whirlpools called gyres, which can be hundreds of miles across. It will then be scooped up and taken by ship to land, where it will be recycled.

Ferrari spoke from Honolulu, where he'd flown after spending the past seven weeks at sea as the system was towed out from San Francisco Bay, where it was built, first at a testing site 350 nautical miles offshore and then another 850 out to sea.

"We weren't aiming for a big extraction, it was just five days to test. And it worked," Ferrari said.

The group of 11 scientists and engineers has been testing the system since Sept. 8. That was the day, accompanied by a press boat, fans and the cheering family of Boyan Slat, the 24-year-old Dutchman and CEO of The Ocean Cleanup who came up with the ideaafter dropping out of college, that the system was towed unassembled out from under the Golden Gate Bridge to a spot off the California coast.

There, it was assembled and tested for seaworthiness for 2½ weeks.

"It was the first time the entire system had been put together. There were a lot of theories about how it would work, but real life is always different," Ferrari said.

The trial went well, so the system was disassembled and towed to its final placement 1,200 nautical miles out, halfway between the West Coast and Hawaii to the middle of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. It took almost two weeks to sail to the spot, where the staff once again put the device together and began testing it.

The Ocean Cleanup, an ocean cleaning system, moves through the San Francisco Bay as it heads towards the Pacific Ocean for testing on Sept. 8. 2018. (Photo: Martin Klimek/USA TODAY)

Although it's officially titled System 001, the crew dubbed the trash-collecting system "Wilson" after the volleyball Tom Hanks turns into a companion in the movie "Cast Away" when he's lost on a deserted island in the middle of the Pacific.

On their way out into the Pacific, the Ocean Cleanup staff and the crew of 17 on the transportation ship encountered heavy weather, including 12-foot waves and winds up to 35 miles per hour. "It was interesting to see the reaction of Wilson - it seemed to us he reacted rather well. He moved with the waves," Ferrari said.

More: A giant floating trash collector will try to scoop up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

More: It took 5 years, now the Ocean Cleanup system is heading to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

More: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

More: 6 things you can do to stop plastic pollution today

After a week at the final site, the ship sailed to Hawaii to swap out the crew and do an equipment hand-off, leaving another ship to stay and monitor Wilson.

Testing included placing buoyant GPS units in the water to see the pathway of items floating near the systemand how they reacted and moved.

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The first week of tests went well, though Ferrari was careful to say that it was too early to make any definitive conclusions about the overall goal of The Ocean Cleanup, which is to deploy 60 such systems by 2020. The group hopes it can clean up 50 percent of the garbage in the garbage patch in five years time.

"We don't have enough time yet to make an estimate," Ferrari said.

The area of the Trash Patch is extremely remote, well off any shipping lanes. During their time there, the crew saw no other ships, though they were visited by a pod of six sperm whales, as well as some mahi-mahi and flying fish.

"We had a hydrophone in the water, so we heard the whales approaching. They didn't really concern themselves with us, they were just passing by," Ferrari said.

The real testing begins now, as winter cyclones begin to form in the area. The observation crew will monitor the floating system as it's driven by waves and currents. The ship will stay well away from it while smaller inflatable boats go in to inspect.

Location of the Ocean Cleanup System 001 as of Oct. 28, 2018. (Photo: Ocean Cleanup)

Ferrari was on his way to The Ocean Cleanup's headquarters in Rotterdam, Netherlands, when he spoke with USA TODAY, after having been away from his family for eight weeks. He and the staff will now begin on the next systems so that a fleet can eventually clean up the garbage humans have been pouring into the oceans for decades.

Researchers and policymakers who study the problem of plastic pollution in the world's oceans have expressed concern both that the Cleanup project might not work as well as its creators hope and that it might also take attention away from the real issue - the ongoing avalanche of plastic pollution that is washed into the world's oceans every day. The hope is that The Ocean Cleanup will bring awareness and help make people think about the plastic they use and where it ends up.

"Everyone intuitively understands that if someone is brave enough to venture out and do that cleanup, then we have to do our part, too. Without turning off the tap of the plastic that washing into the ocean, we can't clean up," said Rolf Halden, a professor of environmental health engineering at Arizona State University who studies plastics in the environment.

"It's wonderful that people are concerned about the state of the open ocean; it's so far away and so few people will ever see it firsthand," said Miriam Goldstein, a marine biologist who is director of ocean policy at the Center for American Progress in Washington, D.C.

"It gives us hope for this very remote ecosystem. If this causes people to change their consumer habits, it's fantastic," she said.

Read or Share this story: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/11/02/ocean-cleanup-system-begins-tidying-up-great-pacific-garbage-patch/1774506002/

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The Great Pacific Garbage Patch covers a million square miles. A 24-year-old dropout is trying to clean it up

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After three weeks of testing and travel, the Ocean Cleanup system has arrived at the Great Pacific Garbage Patch to pick up plastic pollution.

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The Latest Updates on the dropping pH of Our Oceans

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But what exactly is ocean acidification? And what does it mean for marine ecosystems and for humans? The answers can be complicated. But before we get into the details, here are some quick facts that show why ocean acidification is a really big deal for our planet - and why we need to keep dirty fossils in the ground:

Ninety-seven percent of the Earth's water is in the ocean. And the ocean covers more than 70 percent of the planet's surface.

Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, oceans have absorbed an estimated 525 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

The Great Barrier Reef is bleaching rapidly due to climate change and ocean acidification, with only 7 percent of the reef unaffected by the most recent mass bleaching event.

So, exactly what is ocean acidification?

Our oceans are an incredible carbon sink - they absorb about 25 percent of the carbon dioxide humans produce every year. But this is changing sea surface chemistry dramatically: when carbon dioxide is absorbed by the ocean, it dissolves to form carbonic acid. The result, not surprisingly, is that the ocean becomes more acidic, upsetting the delicate pH balance that millions and millions of organisms rely on.

Since the Industrial Revolution, our seas have become about 30 percent more acidic, a rate not observed in 300 million years. This has a wide range of consequences for marine ecosystems, as well as for the billions of people who depend on the ocean for food and survival.

Ocean acidification is often called global warming's evil twin.

Oceans becoming more acidic after the Industrial Revolution is no accident. As humans burn more and more fossil fuels, the concentration of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere continues to rise, driving climate change and making both air and sea temperatures hotter and hotter.

But climate change isn't the only consequence of carbon pollution - so is ocean acidification. With more and more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, oceans absorb more and more of it, becoming - you guessed it - more and more acidic. This is happening at an unprecedented rate and will continue unabated if we don't stop burning dirty fossil fuels.

What are the consequences of ocean acidification?

Ocean acidification doesn't just threaten marine ecosystems. It also puts pressure on human food systems and affects the livelihood of people who depend on the ocean for their income in every way from fishing to tourism.

One reason why? Because as oceans become more acidic, some sea creatures have a more difficult time forming shells, including coral polyps. These are the "tiny builders" of coral reefs - when a polyp attaches to a rock on the seafloor, it divides into many clones and eventually creates a reef. Ocean acidification can slow the growth of coral skeletons, and make reefs more brittle and less resistant to stressors like warming water temperatures.

Keeping coral reefs healthy and growing is vital. Reefs protect our coastlines from erosion and flooding, support local economies through tourism and fisheries, and host vastly productive ecosystems. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, for example, estimates that about half a billion people live within 100 kilometers of a coral reef and benefit from the protection and natural resources it offers. Globally, coral reefs may provide goods and services worth $375 billion each year, which means threats to reefs have profound ripple effects.

What's happening when coral becomes bleached?

You've probably heard a lot lately about mass coral bleaching events in places like the Great Barrier Reef. As NPR explains, "Coral bleaching occurs when the living organisms that make up coral reefs expel the colorful, photosynthetic algae that normally live inside their bodies, and provide them with food. Those algae give coral reefs their color and disappear when the reefs are exposed to stressful climatic conditions, such as temperatures even a few degrees higher than normal."

>>> Related: Climate Change is "Devastating" The Great Barrier Reef <<<

Coral reefs are considered to be the most biodiverse ecosystem on the planet. When coral is hit hard by both ocean acidification and climate change, so too are the many species that humans rely on for food. According to the United Nations Environmental Programme, "fish, including shellfish, contribute 15 percent of animal protein for 3 billion people worldwide. A further 1 billion people rely on fisheries for their primary source of protein."

It's Easy to Sea: We Need to Take Climate Action for Our Oceans

Just like climate change, ocean acidification is already dramatically impacting people (and species) around the world. To save our oceans and stop climate change, we must transition away from burning dirty fossil fuels.

Sign up to join Climate Reality's email activist list. We'll send you the latest on climate science and what you can do to help stop climate change and turn the tide on ocean acidification.

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Global Warming's Evil Twin: Ocean Acidification

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What exactly is ocean acidification? And what does it mean for marine ecosystems and for humans? Here are the facts.

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CONSEQUENCES OF OCEAN HEATING AND ACIDIFICATION

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CONSEQUENCES OF OCEAN HEATING AND ACIDIFICATION

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physics.org Report

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Climate change could alter ocean food chains, leading to far fewer fish in the sea

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Climate change is rapidly warming the Earth and altering ecosystems on land and at sea that produce our food. In the oceans, most added heat from climate warming is still near the surface and will take centuries to work down ...

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Ocean acidification is occurring because excess carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere is being absorbed at the surface of the ocean at an increasing rate. This excess CO2 results in more hydrogen ions, which increases the acidity of the ocean.

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Ocean acidification is occurring because excess carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere is being absorbed at the surface of the ocean at an increasing rate. This excess CO2 results in more hydrogen ions, which increases the acidity of the ocean.

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How Hurricantes are connected to overheated oceans

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How Hurricantes are connected to overheated oceans

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As forecast, Hurricane Rosa is weakening as it moves over the cooler waters of the northern coast of Mexico. However, Rosa will bring flooding rains across northern Mexico and the southwest U.S. over the coming days.

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Rosa had winds of 85 mph, a Category 1 Hurricane, as of 5 a.m. Eastern time Sunday, and was located 385 miles southwest of Punta Eugenia, Mexico.

Rosa is expected to move north on Sunday. Meanwhile, a trough is beginning to take shape over the Pacific Ocean and move east toward the West Coast of the U.S. As Rosa approaches the Baja California peninsula on Monday as a tropical storm it will begin to push deep tropical moisture northward into the southwest U.S.

Rosa will bring up to 10 inches of rain in parts of Mexico on Monday. Then, tropical moisture interacting with the approaching trough will create widespread heavy rainfall in the Southwest over the coming days. Locally, 1 to 4 inches of rain will cause dangerous flash flooding, debris flows and possibility landslides in the desert.

Deep tropical moisture will cause rainfall rates to approach 2 to 3 inches per hour in spots, especially in parts of southern Nevada and Arizona. As much as 2 to 4 inches of rain is expected in parts of the Southwest, especially over much of Arizona. Flash flooding is possible with rapidly deteriorating conditions due to the scattered nature of tropical rain.

It would be extremely ill advised to venture out into the desert on foot with the threat of tropical rainfall. Heavy rain could cause canyons to become raging rivers and thunderstorms will bring locally gusty winds and blowing dust.

The approaching trough will bring some locally heavy rain to parts of the Southern California coastline. Rainfall totals of over half an inch are possible, which could cause minor debris flows and slick roadways. This would be the region's first rainfall of their wet season.

Some scattered tropical rain showers will begin to approach Arizona late Sunday and early Monday, before the rain becomes more widespread late Monday and Tuesday. Heavy rain will spread into the Four Corners on Tuesday and last through Wednesday.

Dramatic temperature changes

October can see some intense temperature swings across the U.S. as the Arctic gets cooler, but the tropics remain quite warm. Sometimes this leads to dramatic changes in temperature over short distances. There is a great example of dramatic temperature differences through the central U.S. on Sunday.

There is nearly a 20-degree temperature difference between Kansas City, Missouri, and Omaha, Nebraska, and between St. Louis and Des Moines, Iowa.

Over the next few days, lingering summer warmth will try to build and expand again. Much of the central and eastern U.S. is expected to see a warm start to October with widespread 80s from the Southern Plains to parts of the Northeast. New York City could reach 80 degrees on Tuesday, which would be approximately 10 degrees above average.

Our long term climate forecast is indicating high chances for above-average temperatures for the eastern U.S. through the first half of October.

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Hurricane Rosa's remnants to bring widespread heavy rain to southwest US

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As forecast, Hurricane Rosa is weakening as it moves over the cooler waters of the northern coast of Mexico. However, Rosa will bring flooding rains across northern Mexico and the southwest U.S. over the coming days. Rosa had winds of 85 mph, a Category 1 Hurricane, as of 5 a.m.

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A new study links rapid deoxygenation in the Gulf of St. Lawrence to two powerful currents: the Gulf Stream and the Labrador Current.

The broad, biologically rich waterway in Eastern Canada which drains North America's Great Lakes and is popular with fishing boats, whales, and tourists has lost oxygen faster than almost anywhere else in the global oceans.

The paper, which appears in Nature Climate Change, explains how large-scale climate change already is causing oxygen levels to drop in the deeper parts of this waterway.

"The area south of Newfoundland is one of the best-sampled regions in the ocean," says first author Mariona Claret, a research associate at the University of Washington's Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean.

"It's also a very interesting area because it's at the crossroads where two big, larger-scale currents interact."
Near hypoxia
Canada's fisheries agency has tracked rising salinity and temperature in the St. Lawrence region since 1920. They've only monitored oxygen since 1960, and the declining trend is causing concern.

"Observations in the very inner Gulf of St. Lawrence show a dramatic oxygen decline, which is reaching hypoxic conditions, meaning it can't fully support marine life," Claret says.

Oxygen declines have been seen to affect Atlantic wolffish, Claret says, and also threaten Atlantic cod, snow crabs, and Greenland halibut that all live in the depths.

"The oxygen decline in this region was already reported, but what was not explored before was the underlying cause," says Claret, who did the work while at McGill University.

The findings confirm a recent study showing that, as carbon dioxide levels rose over the past century due to human emissions, the Gulf Stream has shifted northward and the Labrador Current has weakened.

The new paper finds that this causes more of the Gulf Stream's warm, salty, and oxygen-poor water to enter the St. Lawrence Seaway.
Huge simulation
Researchers used output from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory model, a high-resolution computer model that simulates the world's oceans with a data point every 8 kilometers (5 miles).

The simulation took nine months to run using 10,000 computational nodes-huge, even by the standards of global climate models.

With this precision, eddies and details of the coastline that can influence ocean circulation begin to appear.

Model output combined with the historical observations show that as the carbon dioxide levels go up, Gulf Stream water replaces Labrador Sea water in the deeper parts of the St. Lawrence gulf.

Storms in the Labrador Sea have churned up the waters that the Labrador Current carries, and so air absorbed at the surface mixes far below the surface.

The Gulf Stream, however, is more stratified in stable horizontal layers; the top layer contains oxygen from the air above, but marine life has consumed the lower layers' oxygen.
What's next is unknown
What's more, the warmer Gulf Stream is equally dense at a greater depth, so deeper, more oxygen-deprived layers from the Gulf Stream follow the same density pathway that oxygen-rich near-surface water from the Labrador Current takes.

"We relate a change in oxygen on the coast to a change in large-scale currents in the open ocean," Claret says.

In the model, the shift in the large-scale ocean circulation causing warming and deoxygenation in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence also corresponds with a decline in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, an ocean circulation pattern known to strongly influence Northern Hemisphere climate.

"Being able to potentially link the coastal changes with the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation is pretty exciting," Claret says.

Analysis shows that half the drop in oxygen observed deep in the St. Lawrence River is just due to the warmer water, which can't hold as much oxygen.

The other half is likely due to other factors, such as biological activity in the two currents and inside the channel.

What will happen next is unknown, Claret says. The oxygen levels in the St. Lawrence will depend on much larger questions, she says, like how much carbon dioxide humans will emit into the atmosphere in the coming decades, and how large-scale ocean currents will respond.

The research was published in Nature Climate Change.
Source: University of Washington This article was first published on Futurity. Read the original article.

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This Stretch of Water Is Losing Oxygen Faster Than Almost Anywhere Else in The Ocean

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A new study links rapid deoxygenation in the Gulf of St. Lawrence to two powerful currents: the Gulf Stream and the Labrador Current. The broad, biologically rich waterway in Eastern Canada which drains North America's Great Lakes and is popular with fishing boats, whales, and tourists has lost oxygen faster than almost anywhere else in the global oceans.

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Check out this info

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To understand the changing chemistry of the oceans and the impacts of ocean acidification on marine ecosystems. Our observations of key physical, chemical, and biological parameters support NOAA's overall efforts to predict how marine ecosystems will respond and to develop management strategies for adapting to the consequences of ocean acidification.