Global warming is not only affecting the climate. Scientists now suspect it’s also making Alaskan seas more acidic.
Beneath the sparkling waters of Resurrection Bay, where rich runs of salmon support thriving commercial fish harvests and humpback whales can be seen breaching just offshore in summertime, Jeremy Mathis sees signs of the way greenhouse gases are changing the world’s oceans.
For years, scientists have presented mounting evidence that carbon dioxide emissions are contributing to a change in global climate – raising temperatures, melting polar ice, and perhaps fueling extreme weather. For Dr. Mathis, it is clear that these emissions are also having an effect beneath the waves.
In short, they are turning seawater more acidic. Ocean acidification is often called the twin of climate change. Just as increased carbon in the atmosphere triggers effects that change the climate, increased carbon in the atmosphere – when absorbed by the oceans – triggers acidification in the water.
At this point, the effects are subtle – a small dip in the waters’ pH balance, and a gradual depletion of the minerals that make Alaskan waters so productive for sea life. Indeed, the very characteristics that help make Alaskan waters so rich – the cold temperatures that hold more carbon and shallow waters saturated with nutrients – also make them more susceptible to acidification, experts say.
As with climate change – which has already thawed permafrost, melted sea ice, and shrunk glaciers in Alaska – carbon-caused ocean acidification will likely hit home here first.
“Waters off Alaska are sort of preconditioned to become more acidified,” says Mathis, a University of Alaska, Fairbanks, oceanographer.
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Yereth Rosen, The Christian Science Monitor, 4 December 2009. Full article.
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