Foreboding. Animation of changes in ocean acidification over time in the California Current System. The left side shows the depth of aragonite saturation, and the right side shows thearagonite saturation.
Humanity’s use of fossil fuels sends 35 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year. That has already begun to change the fundamental chemistry of the world’s oceans, steadily making them more acidic. Now, a new high resolution computer model reveals that over the next 4 decades, rising ocean acidity will likely have profound impacts on waters off the West Coast of the United States, home to one of the world’s most diverse marine ecosystems and most important commercial fisheries. These impacts have the potential to upend the entire marine ecosystem and affect millions of people dependent upon it for food and jobs.
About one-third of the carbon dioxide (CO2) humans pump into the atmosphere eventually diffuses into the surface layer of the ocean. There, it reacts with water to create carbonic acid and release positively charged hydrogen ions that increase the acidity of the ocean. Since preindustrial times, ocean acidity has increased by 30%. By 2100, ocean acidity is expected to rise by as much as another 150%.
Declining pH of seawater reduces the amount of carbonate ions in the water, which many shell-building organisms combine with calcium to create the calcium carbonate that they use to build their shells and skeletons. The lower carbonate availability, in turn, decreases a measure known as the saturation state of aragonite, an easily dissolvable mineral form of calcium carbonate that organisms such as oyster larvae rely on to build their shells. If the aragonite saturation state falls below a value of 1, a condition known as undersaturation, all calcium carbonate shells will dissolve. But trouble starts well before that. If the aragonite saturation state falls below 1.5, some organisms such as oyster larvae are unable to harvest enough aragonite to build shells during the first days of their lives, and they typically succumb quickly.
These changes are particularly worrisome for global ocean regions known as eastern boundary upwelling zones. In these regions, such as those along much of the West Coast of the United States, winds push surface water away from the shore, causing water from the deep ocean to well up. This water typically already has naturally high levels of dissolved CO2, produced by microbes that eat decaying algae and other organic matter and then respire CO2. Along the central Oregon coast, for example, when summer winds blow surface ocean waters offshore, a measure of the amount of CO2 in the water known a partial pressure rises from a few hundred to over 2000, causing ocean acidity to spike.
But oceanographers still didn’t have a good handle on how rising atmospheric CO2 levels would interact with CO2 rich waters that upwell naturally. So for their current study, researchers led by Nicolas Gruber, an ocean biogeochemist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, decided to look closely at what’s likely to happen in an upwelling region known as the California Current System off the West Coast of the United States. They constructed a regional ocean model that ties together what’s going on in the atmosphere and the ocean. Because this model focused on the California Current System, Gruber and colleagues were able to give it a resolution 400 times that of conventional global ocean models. In their model, the Swiss team considered different scenarios of CO2 emissions over the next 4 decades and linked these to CO2 produced in the ocean due to respiration.
The buildup of atmospheric CO2 will rapidly increase the amount of undersaturated waters in the upper 60 meters of ocean, where most organisms live, the team reports online today in Science. Prior to industrialization, undersaturation conditions essentially did not exist at this top layer in the ocean. Today, Gruber says, undersaturation conditions exist approximately 2% to 4% of the time. But by 2050, surface waters of the California Current System will be undersaturated for half of the year.
Perhaps just as bad, however, aragonite saturation will fall below 1.5 for large chunks of each year. This could spell doom for Pacific oysters, a $110 million-per-year industry on the West Coast, as well as for other shell-building organisms that are sensitive to changes in ocean acidity, says Sue Cudd, owner of the Whiskey Creek Shellfish Hatchery on Netarts Bay in Oregon. Another species likely to face difficulty are tiny sea snails known as pteropods, which are a vital food source for young salmon.
The new results are “alarming,” says Richard Feely, a chemical oceanographer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, Washington. “It’s dramatic how fast these changes will take place.”
George Waldbusser, an ocean ecologist and biogeochemist at Oregon State University, Corvallis, says it’s not clear precisely how rising acidity will affect different organisms. However, he adds, the changes will likely be broad-based. “It shows us that the windows of opportunity for organisms to succeed get smaller and smaller. It will probably have important effects on fisheries, food supply, and general ocean ecology.”
Significant increase in the activity of the volcano Nevado del Ruiz, Colombia
BY: T
Nevado del Ruiz seems to be getting closer to a new eruption. INGEOMINAS reports that during the last week, there has been a significant increase in the activity of the volcano, which can be summarized as follows:
– From March 27, there have been phases of volcanic tremor pulses related probably to deep magma movements
– Since the last week, there were seismic signals interpreted with rock fracturing, i.e. dike intrusions, located west of the active crater. Similar seismic activity was observed prior to the eruptions in November 1985 and September 1989, although this time it is less energetic.
– On March 29 at 10:54 local time, for a period of 25 minutes, there were over 135 earthquakes located south of Arenas crater at a depth of about 4 km.
– From 04:00 am local time on 31 March, there has been a significant increase in seismicity of events associated with fluid movements and fracturing of rock located in the active crater.
– SO2 emissions continue at high levels.
According to the diagnosis made so far, INGEOMINAS expects an eruption in the coming weeks, but smaller in size than those in November 1985 and September 1989.
A 1.2-magnitude earthquake hit Shanghai Monday night just as a brief thunderstorm struck, causing no casualties but raising public concern online because of the coincidental timing.
It also happened to occur a day after the local seismological bureau had dismissed any possibility that Shanghai might suffer serious damages should another major tsunami be unleashed by a powerful earthquake off Japan.
A prediction by a Japanese government-commissioned panel of another big Japan earthquake had made headlines in local media, with locals fearing the predicted 34-meter-high tsunami waves, caused by a potential 9.0-magnitude earthquake near the Japanese coast, would inundate Shanghai.
Just as locals breathed a sigh of relief reading a no-worry clarification from the seismological authority, many were surprised Monday night to feel several seconds of strong building shaking from the local earthquake.
The city’s seismological bureau said the 1.2-magnitude quake took place at 11:27pm, with the epicenter in Minhang District at a depth of just 10 kilometers.
Given its shallow depth, the slight-magnitude quake was still obvious enough to be felt by many locals, seismological officials said.
“Did I just feel an earthquake? Who else felt the same?” read a post, and many like it, sweeping through Weibo.com, a twitter-like social-networking platform, minutes after the quake. Curious netizens discussed the scope of affected areas by reporting where they felt it.
Hosepipe bans affecting about 20 million customers have been introduced by seven water authorities in parts of southern and eastern England.
People who flout the bans, which follow one of the driest two-year periods on record, face fines of up to £1,000.
Suppliers Thames, Southern, South East, Anglian, Sutton and East Surrey, Veolia Central and Veolia South East have all introduced “temporary use bans”.
The government has urged householders to be “smarter about how we use water”.
Using a hosepipe to water a garden, water plants, fill a pond not containing fish, or clean outdoor surfaces are all banned as are filling and maintaining ornamental fountains.
But exemptions are in place for grass and surfaces used for national and international sports which means the Olympic and Paralympic games will be unaffected.
Disabled people with blue badges are exempt, while some businesses, including car washing firms, will also be allowed to continue using hosepipes in most areas.
And some drip irrigation systems featuring perforated hoses are allowed…..
“Extreme weather is fast becoming the new normal. Canada and much of the United States experienced summer temperatures during winter this year, confirming the findings of a new report on extreme weather.”
Extreme weather is fast becoming the new normal. Canada and much of the United States experienced summer temperatures during winter this year, confirming the findings of a new report on extreme weather.
For two weeks this March most of North America baked under extraordinarily warm temperatures that melted all the snow and ice and broke 150-year-old temperature records by large margins.
Last year the U.S. endured 14 separate billion-dollar-plus weather disasters including flooding, hurricanes and tornados.
A new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), released Mar. 28, provides solid evidence that record-breaking weather events are increasing in number and becoming more extreme. And if current rates of greenhouse gas emissions are maintained, these events will reach dangerous new levels over the coming century.
Massive Gas Leak Could Be the North Sea’s Deepwater Horizon
—By Julia Whitty
A natural gas well in the North Sea 150 miles off Aberdeen, Scotland, sprung a massive methane leak on March 25. The 238 workers were all safely evacuated. But the situation is so explosive that an exclusion zone for ships and aircraft has been set up around the rig, reports the Mail Online. And nearby rigs have been evacuated, reports the New York Times:
Royal Dutch Shell said it closed its Shearwater field, about four miles away, withdrawing 52 of the 90 workers there; it also suspended work and evacuated 68 workers from a drilling rig working nearby, the Hans Deul.
But that’s not the worst of it. The platform lies less than 100 yards/meters from a flare that workers left burning as crew evacuated. The French super-major oil company owner of the rig, Total, dismissed the risk, while the British government claimed the flame needs to burn to prevent gas pressure from building up. But Reuters reports:
[O]ne energy industry consultant said Elgin could become “an explosion waiting to happen” if the oil major did not rapidly stop the leak which is above the water at the wellhead.
The circumstances that ended the last ice age, somewhere between 19,000 and 10,000 years ago, have been unclear. In particular, scientists aren’t sure how carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, played into the giant melt.
New research indicates it did in fact help drive this prehistoric episode of global warming, even though it did not kick it off. A change in the Earth’s orbit likely started of the melt, setting off a chain of events, according to the researchers.
The ambiguity about the end of the ice age originates in the Antarctic. Ice cores from the continent reveal a problematic time lag: Temperatures appeared to begin warming before atmospheric carbon dioxide increased. This has led scientists to question how increasing carbon dioxide – a frequently cited cause for global warming now and in the distant past – factored into the end of the last ice age. Global warming skeptics have also cited this as evidence carbon dioxide produced by humans is not responsible for modern global warming.
But the data from Antarctica alone offer too narrow a perspective to represent what was happening on a global scale, according to lead study researcher Jeremy Shakun of Harvard University…..
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