Posted on 10/20/2005 11:55:23 AM PDT by cogitator
Well, what's the measure?
Someone please save the Hasidics in the oceans! How they got there, who's to know?
I thought it had been shown that the limiting nutrient was trace iron??? And that adding just a small amount of iron caused massive blooms of phytoplankton??
First decimal place. Surface pH has decreased about 0.1 pH unit since the late 1800s.
I'm not sure what you mean; but deep water formation will capture surface atmospheric CO2 concentrations and move them into the deep ocean.
Depends on where you are. There's plenty of iron in coastal waters, so there nitrate and phosphate are the limiting nutrients. In the open ocean a long way from the continents, iron can be limiting.
first you have to see if you can actually sustain the CO2 levels in such a large volume, with an equivalent environment and availability of other resources - or will the organisms simply use the CO2 and thus take it out of the system? ...Perhaps even as more CaCO3. Will the increase in acidity act upon the corals first, or upon the ocena floor and debris - which would result in an increase in materials available?
Yes, though until you get to extreme concentrations you can ignore the NaCl part.
CO2 dissolved in water is carbonic acid.
The salt is largely irrelevant, though at extremes it may act as a buffering agent. Soda water is slightly acidic. As example, watch how you can shine pennies in soda water - it is the carbonic acid which causes that effect.
Plants in the ocean are just like land plants. They take in CO2 and photosynthesize it. If there is more CO2 it won't change the CO2 level. There will just be more plant growth. Sheesh.
Water. Few acids have any major effect without the prescence of water.
Distilled pure water has a pH of 7, which is to say that the concentration of Hydronium ions and Hydroxide ions are both at 10^-7. It is these ions that have the majority of the acidic or basic effect.
So if it was 7.3, it's now 7.2? What are the actual numbers?
"Marine Organisms Threatened By Increasingly Acidic Ocean"
This is serious. Is it caused by the cold? Or all that ice? Have they had this problem in the tropics or in desert regions? How about the army or navy?
Oh wait, I Thought the headline read:
MARINE ORGASMS THREATENED BY INCREASING ARTIC OCEAN.
It's been done (read the paragraph starting "As a complement to...")
As a complement to model projections, one of the study coauthors, Victoria Fabry from the Department of Biological Sciences at California State University San Marcos, set up two-day shipboard experiments and demonstrated how shells of live pteropods begin to dissolve when the corrosive conditions that are projected to occur by 2100 are met. “Those results,” Fabry says, “suggest that for subpolar and polar pteropods to survive, they will need either to adapt to the expected changes in seawater chemistry or move to warmer, lower-latitude surface waters,”"Begin to dissolve" isn't a very scientific statement. The experiment also isn't a very good indicator of whether the little buggers can adapt.
You're correct in the trend, but surface pH is in the 8.1 to 8.4 range. Deep ocean pH gets down to 7.5-7.6.
That might take time. Individual organisms won't adapt; the change will be to populations and will be evolutionary.
I just read an article about insects that adapt to resist insecticides in a much shorter time frame.
Where can I find some real numbers? I want to know more than just the trend.
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