We have a problem. A serious problem. And no, we’re not
talking about global warming (not that it isn’t a huge problem, too). Every
day, we pump about 70 million tons of CO2 into the air, much of
which our ocean absorb. For a long time, we thought this was good and would
help put off global warming; it turns out we were wrong.
By pumping all this CO2 into the oceans, we are
disrupting the pH balance that ocean life relies on to survive. This rise in
acidity is (for now) affecting shallower coastal waters, affecting those
organisms that rely on calcium carbonate to form shells and exoskeletons.
Higher acidity in ocean waters means that these shells and coral are being
thinned, weakened, and dissolved.
Hard evidence of this has already been discovered. Tiny
creatures called pteropods have had their shells begin to deteriorate and
dissolve in the more acidic waters. And even though pteropods are not consumed
by humans, they are a major part of the food chain for fish like pink salmon.
Gretchen Hofmann is a biologist at UC Santa Barbara. In an
interview with the Seattle times, she explained the significance of pteropods
to the food chain. “They’re small but they carry an enormous amount of
nutrition and are eaten by very big fish. If you’re in the Antarctic and see a
beautiful emperor penguin, it exists by eating fish under the sea ice. And
those fish eat pteropods.”
If we don’t do something big to combat this, we’re soon to
be in deep trouble. Unlike global warming, which is a future threat we are
preparing to combat, ocean acidification is a problem we must face head on in
the present.
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