Ocean Acidification

The world’s oceans absorb approximately a quarter of all carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions. During absorption, CO₂ reacts with seawater and oceanic pH levels fall. This is known as ocean acidification and results in lower carbon ion concentrations. Certain ocean inhabitants use carbon ion to build and sustain their shells. Pteropods, which are important components of the marine ecosystem, are among them.

Certain aspects about pteropods, including life cycles and population dynamics, are not well-studied. This is partly due to their size—some sea butterfly species measure less than a millimeter—and poor long-term survival in captivity. Now, a team of marine scientists has examined life cycles, abundance, and seasonal variability of shelled sea butterflies in the north-east Scotia Sea, a region undergoing some of the fastest climate change in the Southern Ocean.

“Decline in Antarctic Ocean pteropod populations could have cascading ramifications to the food web and carbon cycle,” said Dr. Clara Manno, a researcher at the British Antarctic Survey and corresponding author of the study published in Frontiers in Marine Science. “Knowledge about the life cycle of this keystone organism may improve prediction of ocean acidification impacts on the Antarctic ecosystem.”

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A new study by researchers at the University of Toronto finds that climate change is causing a commercially significant marine crab to lose its sense of smell, which could partially explain why their populations are thinning. 

The research was done on Dungeness crabs and found that ocean acidification causes them to physically sniff less, impacts their ability to detect food odours and even decreases activity in the sensory nerves responsible for smell.  

“This is the first study to look at the physiological effects of ocean acidification on the sense of smell in crabs,” says Cosima Porteus, an assistant professor in the department of biological sciences at U of T Scarborough and co-author of the study along with post-doctoral researcher Andrea Durant.      

The Earth’s oceans are becoming more acidic because they are absorbing increasing amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Such ocean acidification is a direct consequence of burning fossil fuels and carbon pollution – and several studies have shown it’s having an impact on the behaviour of marine wildlife.

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(Washington, DC) – Today, the U.S. House of Representatives considered and passed two bipartisan Science, Space, and Technology Committee bills: H.R. 676, the Coastal Communities Ocean Acidification Act of 2023 and H.R. 1715, the Advanced Weather Model Computing Development Act.

“I applaud the passage of these two bipartisan pieces of Committee legislation,” said Chairman Frank Lucas. “Improved community engagement with Indian Tribes, as well as state and local government, will improve NOAA’s work to support the health and long-term growth of our marine ecosystems. Collaboration between the Department of Energy and NOAA will not only improve NOAA’s forecasting, but the opportunity to analyze large weather data sets will help to advance machine learning at DOE. […]”

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H.R. 676, the Coastal Communities Ocean Acidification Act of 2023, requires the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to collaborate with State and local governments and Indian Tribes on vulnerability assessments related to ocean acidification, research planning, and similar activities.

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The bipartisan Coastal Communities Ocean Acidification Act would require NOAA to collaborate with state, local, and tribal government entities on ocean acidification vulnerability assessments, research planning, and information sharing.

Congresswoman Chellie Pingree (D-Maine) today celebrated the passage of her bipartisan Coastal Communities Ocean Acidification Act of 2023 in the U.S. House of Representatives. The bill, introduced in January by Pingree and Congressman Michael Waltz (R-Fla.), would direct the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to support the current efforts of coastal communities, particularly those who are underserved and rural, that are already facing the impacts of ocean acidification and better equip them with the resources to respond.

“Ocean acidification threatens not only our fisheries but the entire blue economy, our marine resources, industries, jobs, and coastal communities like those in Maine,” said Pingree, ranking member of the House Appropriations Interior and Environment Subcommittee. “My bipartisan Coastal Communities Ocean Acidification Act will address the growing and far-reaching threat of ocean acidification to help ensure that our ocean industries, including fisheries, and the communities that depend on them, are more resilient to our changing oceans. I thank my House colleagues for their strong support and urge Senators to do the same so we can get this important bill to President Biden.”

“Florida’s waterways are essential to our economic growth and prosperity,” said Waltz. “As Floridians, we have experienced firsthand the devastating effects of harmful algal blooms and red tides on our coastal communities. We must work to better understand the connection between ocean acidification and increased toxicity to prevent them moving forward. Today’s passage of this bill brings us one step closer to bolstering collaboration among all stakeholders working to protect Florida’s waterways.”

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The Port of Miami is a bustling waterway with large cruise and cargo ships, ferries, fishing vessels, and recreational boats. As it turns out, this waterway is also home to a resilient coral community.

According to a new study in Nature’s Scientific Reports by researchers with NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory (AOML), the University of Miami Cooperative Institute of Marine and Atmospheric Studies (CIMAS) and other partners, the corals within this urbanized environment have demonstrated great resilience against unfavorable conditions, such as poor water quality, excess nutrients, high temperatures, high salinity, and low pH levels. These corals have built strong and diverse communities on man-made substrates, such as seawalls and discarded objects.

“The Port of Miami is quite different from the places where we normally work. Everything is artificial, engineered, and constructed,” said Ian Enochs, research ecologist at NOAA AOML and lead author of the new study.  “Somehow, nature has found a way to persist even in the most unnatural of environments.”

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Since humans began emitting large amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere at the start of the Industrial Revolution in 1750, scientists estimate that the ocean has absorbed 20 to 30 percent of these emissions. This is good news for reducing atmospheric CO2, the primary cause of modern climate warming, but the resulting chemical changes in ocean water are increasing acidity and restricting the lives of marine organisms. If humans continue to emit CO2 at high levels, preliminary model projections show a 100 to 150 percent increase in acidity from 2000 to 2100, jeopardizing marine ecosystems and the goods and services they provide to billions of people around the world. Accurate predictions of ocean acidity on regional and global scales are essential for informing critical research, mitigation, and adaptation strategies. A newly published study, supported by a collaboration between CPO’s Climate Observations and Monitoring (COM) Program, Climate Variability and Predictability (CVP) Program, and NOAA’s Global Ocean Monitoring and Observing (GOMO) Program, presents a new data product spanning 1750 to 2100 of marine chemical properties that indicate ocean acidification processes. 

An international group of researchers used 14 different Earth System Models from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6), along with three of the latest available observational datasets, to produce ocean acidification projections that have improved spatial and temporal resolution and overall data quantity compared to previous research. This study, received additional support from NOAA’s Ocean Acidification Program (OAP), National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), Cooperative Institutes, and laboratories, is published in the Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems, and the data product is available for the research community to access for future research. The COM-CVP-GOMO collaboration funded scientist Brendan R. Carter, contributor to this project, as part of an initiative to increase the use and value of ocean observations, advance our understanding of climate variability and change, and enhance NOAA’s ability to model and predict the Earth System.

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New tool available for predicting the future of ocean acidification

A team of scientists from across NOAA have created a new tool to help people adapt to ocean acidification in a time of industrialization and increased emissions. The new data product, featured in the Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems, combines observational data with computer simulations and will provide improved global and regional projections for ocean change.

The scientists used models of the changing ocean to determine how chemistry, biology, and physical forces could work together in a changing ocean and to provide projections for 10 different indicators of ocean acidification. They used existing “Shared Socioeconomic Pathways” (known as SSPs) previously developed by the World Climate Research Programme for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Sixth Assessment Report.

“These regional and global projections and maps enable communities across the world to develop more informed adaptation and mitigation strategies,” says the lead author of the study, Li-Qing Jiang at NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information and the Earth System Science Center at University of Maryland.

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WASHINGTON – Today, the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology passed seven bipartisan bills at a full committee markup. 

“These bills all contribute to a larger effort to improve federal R&D, make it more efficient, and help our science agencies to better serve our communities,” Chairman Frank Lucas said. His opening statement can be found here. The bills passed today include:

H.R. 676, the Coastal Communities Ocean Acidification Act of 2023, requires NOAA to collaborate with State and local governments and Indian Tribes on vulnerability assessments related to ocean acidification, research planning, and similar activities.

“NOAA has already established an Interagency Working Group and conducts the strategic research plan and program research required by the Federal Ocean Acidification Research and Monitoring Act of 2009. And while state and local governments, industry, academia, and other representatives are included in this work, there is no specific call out for Indian Tribes. This bill seeks to amend that by updating the statute directing collaboration of these activities to include Indian Tribes.” – Chairman Lucas

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Three Saildrone Explorers, uncrewed surface vehicles used to measure ocean data, embarked on a six-month journey around Hawaiʻi Island, Maui, Oʻahu and Kauaʻi to evaluate ocean health across the state. The University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Pacific Marine Environmental Lab (PMEL), and the Cooperative Institute for Climate, Ocean, and Ecosystem Studies (CICOES), are working with Saildrone Inc. to pilot this effort. 

The 23-foot ocean drones will send back critical data and images in real-time to scientists in Hawaiʻi and Washington State so they can assess how climate change and ocean acidification are impacting our coastal waters.

The saildrones left from Pacific Shipyards International in Honolulu Harbor on Oʻahu in March and the official mission started on April 1.

Each saildrone will collect critical ocean chemistry observations around Hawaiʻi to better assess the state’s vulnerability to ocean chemistry changes. This effort is a part of the $50 million gift from Dr. Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg to the Hawaiʻi Institute of Marine Biology in 2022 to improve Hawaiʻi’s ocean health.

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California Academy of Sciences: An international research team develops a rubric for governments and policy making bodies to evaluate preparedness for ocean acidification.

In a paper published today in the journal Environmental Research Letters, an international research team composed of scientists affiliated with more than a dozen institutions, including the California Academy of Sciences, propose a first-of-its-kind framework for governments around the world to evaluate their preparedness for — and guide future policies to address — ocean acidification, among the most dire threats to marine ecosystems.

Ocean acidification is one of climate change’s silent killers,” says Rebecca Albright, PhD, Academy Curator of Invertebrate Zoology and founder of the Coral Regeneration Lab (CoRL). “While not as high-profile as threats like coral bleaching, ocean acidification will cause widespread destruction of marine environments by the end of this decade if we don’t take urgent action. To help policymakers identify what actions they should take, my collaborators and I asked ourselves, ‘What would a government have to do in order to have a comprehensive plan to safeguard both the environment and society from ocean acidification?'”

A vibrant coral reef in the Maldives. Credit: Luiz Rocha, California Academy of Sciences.

In a paper published today in the journal Environmental Research Letters, an international research team composed of scientists affiliated with more than a dozen institutions, including the California Academy of Sciences, propose a first-of-its-kind framework for governments around the world to evaluate their preparedness for—and guide future policies to address—ocean acidification, among the most dire threats to marine ecosystems.

“Ocean acidification is one of climate change’s silent killers,” says Rebecca Albright, Ph.D., Academy Curator of Invertebrate Zoology and founder of the Coral Regeneration Lab (CoRL). “While not as high-profile as threats like coral bleaching, ocean acidification will cause widespread destruction of marine environments by the end of this decade if we don’t take urgent action. To help policymakers identify what actions they should take, my collaborators and I asked ourselves, ‘What would a government have to do in order to have a comprehensive plan to safeguard both the environment and society from ocean acidification?'”

Ultimately, the researchers identified six aspects of effective ocean acidification policy, along with specific indicators for each, that policymaking bodies, from local governments to federal agencies, can use to evaluate and guide their own policies.

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Juvenile sea scallops obtained from ​​Pine Point Oyster Company in Maine were used in this ocean acidification exposure study.

A new study published in PLOS Climate indicates that ocean acidification conditions projected between now and 2100 depress the growth of juvenile Atlantic sea scallops. Ocean acidification is caused by the ocean absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, resulting in chemical changes that increase acidity. Ocean warming may further hinder growth. Atlantic sea scallops support one of the most valuable fisheries in the United States, worth $670 million in 2021.

Postdoctoral researcher and lead author Emilien Pousse said, “This work describes the energetic balance of sea scallops under ocean acidification conditions for the first time, a species of economic and socio-cultural importance. Within our changing world, getting to know how our marine resources and fisheries could be affected by ocean warming and acidification in the near future is the key to anticipate the upcoming changes.”

The 8-week study was a collaboration between NOAA Fisheries and Massachusetts Maritime Academy in Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts. Faculty and students helped NOAA scientists conduct the study at the campus’ aquaculture lab. Scientists exposed the scallops to three different carbon dioxide levels and measured their growth and metabolism, including feeding, respiration, and excretion rates. Ocean acidification conditions significantly reduced the scallops’ ability to take up energy.

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IOC/UNESCO’s efforts to advance towards the Sustainable Development Goal 14.3 “Minimize and address the impacts of ocean acidification, including through enhanced scientific cooperation at all levels’ involve its role as the custodian agency for the associated indicator 14.3.1, meaning that it is responsible for the compilation and sharing of global data on ocean acidification.

Ocean acidification is a significant environmental threat that is having a profound impact on marine life, including coral reefs, shellfish, and many other species. A lack of a global framework for measuring the effects of ocean acidification on marine life has made it difficult for the scientific community to effectively assess this issue.  

The publication of the new article “Unifying biological field observations to detect and compare ocean acidification impacts across marine species and ecosystems: What to monitor and why” by the GOA-ON Biological Working Group, supported by IOC/UNESCO, provides a global guiding framework for the scientific community to measure the impacts of ocean acidification on marine life.  It  proposes five broad classes of biological indicators that, when coupled with environmental observations including carbonate chemistry, would allow to observe and compare the rate and severity of biological change in response to ocean acidification globally. 

Such a novel observing methodology allows inclusion of a wide diversity of marine ecosystems in regional and global assessments and has the potential to increase the contribution of ocean acidification observations from countries with developing ocean acidification science capacity.

Read the paper online:  https://os.copernicus.org/articles/19/101/2023/ 

IOC-UNESCO, 31 January 2023. Press release.

A new study of red sea urchins, a commercially valuable species, investigated how different populations respond to changes in their environments. The results show that red sea urchin populations in Northern and Southern California are adapted to their local conditions but differ in their vulnerability to the environmental changes expected to occur in the future due to global climate change and ocean acidification.

The new findings, published January 20 in Science Advances, indicate that red sea urchin populations in Southern California may be more vulnerable to climate change than those in Northern California. Although the sea urchins in Southern California are already adapted to warmer conditions, the researchers suspect that further warming of their environment may be more than they can tolerate.

“Red sea urchins from the Southern California population were much more sensitive to environmental changes than those from Northern California, and we think that is likely because they are already closer to some kind of thermal limit,” said senior author Kristy Kroeker, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UC Santa Cruz.

First author Emily Donham led the study as a UCSC graduate student and is now a postdoctoral scholar at UC Santa Barbara. “Red sea urchins are an important fishery species along our coast, so understanding how they are likely to be impacted by climate change is very important,” she said.

The study looked at the effects of three key environmental variables in the sea urchins’ coastal habitat: water temperature, dissolved oxygen, and pH (a measure of ocean acidification). Climate change driven by increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is warming the oceans and reducing oxygen levels in the water, while increased absorption of carbon dioxide by seawater leads to ocean acidification.

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Increasing concentration of CO₂ and global warming could lead to a shift of the dominant plankton population in the ocean, intriguing new research shows. If CO₂ emissions into the atmosphere remain high until the year 2100, a different type of plankton will become the dominant species in the North Atlantic Ocean. This shift in plankton populations will also have an additional negative effect as less carbon will be stored in the deep ocean waters. As result, more of the emitted CO₂ will remain in the atmosphere, Amber Boot, Anna von der Heydt and Henk Dijkstra (NESSC/IMAU) illustrate in a paper published today in Geophysical Research Letters.

Plankton – the collective name for a wide range of different organisms living in ocean waters – plays an important role in removing carbon from the atmosphere and storing it for thousands of years in the deep waters of the ocean. This biological process counteracts and slows down the still increasing concentration of CO₂ in the earth’s atmosphere. However, the production of plankton and the speed of carbon sequestration are linked to different conditions which can be influenced by the concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere.

Curious to learn how increasing CO₂ can influence this important process, PhD candidate Amber Boot modeled the response of the oceans to a steeply increasing concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere until the year 2100. Results of this high CO₂ scenario indicate that at the end of this century the most dominant plankton type in the North Atlantic Ocean will disappear and be replaced by a different plankton population. This type of plankton, however, has a lower efficiency in removing carbon from the surface ocean, thereby reducing the capacity of the ocean to uptake carbon. The shift in plankton population would also result in a higher concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere, enhancing further climate change.

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Effect of Plankton Composition Shifts in the North Atlantic on Atmospheric pCO₂, Amber Boot, Anna. S. von der Heydt, and Henk A. Dijkstra, Geophysical Research Letters, 49, 2022, DOI 10.1029/2022GL100230.

An increase in marine heatwaves due to global climate change in the coming decades will have a significant impact on lifeforms in this environment, including those at the bottom of the food chain, according to a paper published in Estuarine, Coastal and Shelf Science by Brazilian researchers working in Brazil, Norway and the United States,

Marine heatwaves are periods of more than five days with water temperatures more than 90% above the historical average for the region. Projections point to a rise of 35% in the frequency of marine heatwaves by the year 2100 for the Santos-São Vicente area (coast of São Paulo state, Brazil) in which the study reported by the paper was conducted. It is important to distinguish between marine and atmospheric heatwaves, the latter typically being more intense but affecting mainly terrestrial environments, including cities.

The researchers evaluated the potential impact of marine heatwaves on planktonic larvae of the Atlantic mangrove fiddler crab Leptuca thayeri. “Although the larvae survived a rise in the acidity of the water, a rise of 2 °C in sea surface temperature during the first three to four days of their lives led to a 15% drop in the survival rate compared with larvae at the average temperature for the region. A rise of 4 °C led to a 34% rise in mortality,” said Murilo Zanetti Marochi, first author of the paper. The study was conducted while he was on a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Institute of Biosciences of the São Paulo State University’s Coast Campus (IB-CLP-UNESP) in São Vicente.

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Nearly 100 million years ago, the Earth experienced an extreme environmental disruption that choked oxygen from the oceans and led to elevated marine extinction levels that affected the entire globe. 

Now, in a pair of complementary new studies, two Northwestern University-led teams of geoscientists report new findings on the chronology and character of events that led to this occurrence, known as Ocean Anoxic Event 2 (OAE2), which was co-discovered more than 40 years ago by late Northwestern professor Seymour Schlanger. 

By studying preserved planktonic microfossils and bulk sediment extracted from three sites around the world, the team collected direct evidence indicating that ocean acidification occurred during the earliest stages of the event, due to carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions from the eruption of massive volcanic complexes on the sea floor.

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A recent comment piece in Nature Climate Change, involving eleven scientists from 7 countries, expresses the desperate need for a significant reduction in CO₂ emissions if we are to protect the cryosphere, a term used to encapsulate the frozen areas of this planet.
 
Cryosphere habitats, such as Arctic sea ice, glaciers across the world, ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, and permafrost have experienced losses through melting over the last several decades as a result of climate change but sadly, that is just the tip of the iceberg.
 
The cryosphere is particularly vulnerable to climate change mainly due to the risk of crossing abrupt and/or irreversible thresholds, often called tipping points. ‘Abrupt’ in this case means a much faster change than usual for that system, while irreversibility depends on the timescale at which a system can recover to its previous state.
 
Limiting emission, and therefore warming, in line with the Paris Agreement might still suffice to avoid passing multiple thresholds, including those of melting the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, and boreal permafrost thaw. However the precise nature of the Earth system thresholds is subject to considerable uncertainties.
 
Following the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 6th report, risks rapidly escalate above 1.5°C and even more so if 2°C is exceeded. Exceeding 3°C would almost certainly trigger ice sheet instability, as well as cause widespread ocean acidification resulting in episodes that would corrode carbonate minerals, which are used to form shells and skeletons by some key marine animals.
 
Polar ocean acidification is approaching a chemical threshold within the coming decades. At 1.5-2°C warming, Arctic waters will be corrosive to important minerals for several months of the year, with the Southern Ocean following at 2-3°C warming. It will take tens of thousands of years to reverse due to the very slow ocean processes involved. The good news is that limiting warming to 1.5°C can avoid the worst of these impacts.

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International research co-authored by scientists at the Education University of Hong Kong (EdUHK) found that a major type of marine species can adapt to ocean acidification. Considered a major breakthrough in marine biology research, the findings were recently published in the journal Nature Climate Change.

As our planet is witnessing an ever-increasing level of carbon dioxide emissions, the threat of ocean acidity has become all the more acute. To examine the long-term effects of ocean acidification on biodiversity and the food chain, seven scholars from South Korea, mainland China, Hong Kong, and the United States carried out a two-year study on the reproduction of marine species in an acidified environment.

One member of the research team was Professor Rudolf Wu Shiu-sun, Advisor (Environmental Science) in the Department of Science and Environmental Studies at EdUHK, who was responsible for relating the phenotypic and epigenetic changes among marine organisms, and explaining the relevant environmental implications of the study.

The team chose as its research subject copepods, one of the most abundant classes of zooplankton, which plays a key role in the food chain in the marine environment. To mimic ocean acidification, copepods were placed in water with increasing acidity (pH 8.0, pH 7.7 and pH 7.3) to evaluate the impact of acidification on their ability to reproduce.

The results showed that in an acidified environment, the fertility and sex ratio of copepods were adversely affected in the first and second generations (F0 and F1), but were significantly restored in the third generation (F2). This suggests that copepods have a self-repairing ability to adapt to environmental change.

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More information: Young Hwan Lee et al, Epigenetic plasticity enables copepods to cope with ocean acidification, Nature Climate Change (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41558-022-01477-4

More than 90% of marine species are undescribed and many may go extinct due to human activity before they’re discovered—the loss of unique, potentially valuable genetic resources resulting in unpredictable effects on global ecosystems essential to human food supplies and climate regulation.

Without knowledge of these species, effective deep sea conservation is impossible, leading international marine scientists warned in a new policy brief presented at the UN Biodiversity Conference (COP15) today in Montreal.

They urge global policy-makers to support urgently needed new research to fill a critical knowledge gap.

While roughly 28,000 deep-sea animal species have been described and named, an estimated 2.2 million other marine species, including deep-sea, are unknown to science, of which many are thought to be threatened with extinction.

In 2019, the Scaly-foot Snail (Chrysomallon squamiferum) became the first deep-sea species listed as globally endangered due to the threat of deep-seabed mining.

“Conservation of deep-sea species found in ‘areas beyond national jurisdiction’ is particularly challenging,” the policy brief says.

“We know very little about them, and there is not yet an international framework to guide the implementation of conservation measures,” says lead author of the brief, Dr. Stefanie Kaiser of the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum, Frankfurt.

Knowledge of deep-sea species biodiversity is an obvious first step to effective protection of both the species and the ecosystem processes associated with them.

The scientists warn that deep sea species are increasingly exposed to pollution and habitat destruction.

In particular, global warming, ocean acidification and resource depletion could lead to dramatic changes in deep-sea biodiversity with unpredictable consequences for humans as well.

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