The Joint ICES/OSPAR Study Group on Ocean Acidification (SGOA) was formed in 2012 to develop an ocean acidification monitoring programme for the waters of the OSPAR area. SGOA brought together experts from the disciplines of chemistry, biology, and others to address the challenge of designing a long-term monitoring programme that examines both the biogeochemical changes associated with ocean acidification and the responses of potentially-sensitive marine life.
PacIOOS has partnered with NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL) to provide real-time data from thirteen buoys across the Pacific Ocean. These buoys measure the carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere and ocean which in turn provides valuable information to monitor ocean acidification.
The European Project on Ocean Acidification (EPOCA) was Europe’s first major research initiative and the first large-scale international research effort devoted to studying the impacts and consequences of ocean acidification. EPOCA was an EU FP7 Integrated Project active during four years, from 2008 to 2012.
The EPOCA consortium brought together more than 160 researchers from 32 institutes in 10 European countries (Belgium, France, Germany, Iceland, Italy, The Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom) and was coordinated by the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) with the project office based at the Institut de la Mer de Villefranche, France (formerly Observatoire Oceanologique de Villefranche).
As one of the largest national research programmes on ocean acidification, BIOACID has contributed to quantifying the effects of ocean acidification on marine organisms and their habitats, unravelling the mechanisms underlying the observed responses, assessing the potential for evolutionary adaptation, and determining how these responses are modulated by other environmental drivers.
Pristine Seas is an exploration, research, and conservation project that aims to find, survey, and help protect the last healthy, undisturbed places in the ocean. National Geographic Explorer in Residence Enric Sala launched the Pristine Seas project in 2008.
The European project on ocean acidification (EPOCA) was the first international research effort on ocean acidification. Launched in May 2008 with the overall goal to further our understanding of the biological, ecological, biogeochemical, and societal implications of ocean acidification, it comprised over 160 scientists from 32 institutions in 10 European countries. EPOCA was partly funded by the European Commission (EC, EUR 6.5 million for a total budget of EUR 16 million) and was launched in May 2008 for four years.
European Commission, CORDIS, 30 April 2012. Resource.
They are the archives of the oceans. Corals are a great indicator of how much human activities affect our oceans. Funded by the Franco-German fellowship program “Make Our Planet Great Again,” researchers in the U Bremen Research Alliance are studying the extent of global warming in tropical waters.
The forearm-thick whitish drill core held by Dr. Henry Wu of the Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research (ZMT) has come a long way. It originates from a stony coral from the coastal region off Rotuma, an island in the Republic of Fiji, more than 15,000 kilometers from Bremen. The oldest corals being examined by the paleo-climatologist are more than 100,000 years old. In the course of their lives, they have accumulated a vast amount of information.
Corals grow on average a few millimeters per year. They thrive best in clean water and live up to 50 meters below the surface of the sea, where sunrays can still reach them. Just like the growth rings of trees, the micro samples from their calcareous skeleton tell of changing environmental conditions: temperature fluctuations, the amount of rainfall, ocean acidification, and salinity – and they do so with month-to-month precision.
Wu is using these archives of the ocean within the context of his five-year research project. “Climate has always been changing naturally. We want to know: How profound were these changes? What impact has industrialization had since the beginning of the 19th century?” says the researcher. “If we know the past, we can better predict the future.”
A team of researchers called SEA MATE, led by Stony Brook University professor Matthew Eisaman, is using electricity to remove acid from the ocean while also taking carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Continually increasing carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere have already led to changes in the climate as well as the acidification of the oceans. This increased acidity of the oceans is analogous to a slow motion “spill” of acid, so just as oil spills need to be cleaned up, so do these acid spills.
Matthew Eisaman, professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
The approach of SEA MATE (Safe Elevation of Alkalinity for the Mitigation of Acidification Through Electrochemistry) uses carbon-free electricity and electrochemistry to effectively pump this excess acid out of the ocean and then sells the acid for useful purposes. This acid removal restores the ocean chemistry such that the remaining ions in the ocean react with atmospheric carbon dioxide, safely locking it up for 10,000 – 200,000 years as oceanic bicarbonate. The net effect of SEA MATE is the reversal of ocean acidification along with the net removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
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Early deployments will likely partner with existing marine industries such as seawater desalination, aquaculture, maritime transport, and offshore wind. As an example, performing the SEA MATE process on the waste effluent from desalination plants would provide value to these plants by reducing their environmental impact, while also mitigating ocean acidification and decreasing the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide.
In 2017, the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed the time frame of 2021-2030 as the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development, also known as the “Ocean Decade,” to address the degradation of the ocean and encourage innovative science initiatives to better understand and ultimately reverse its declining health.
Several collaborative initiatives featuring work by scientists at NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanographic Meteorological Laboratory (AOML) have recently been endorsed in the first Ocean Decade Actions announcement, made by the United Nations Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) of UNESCO in 2021.
The Foraminifera Project is a collaboration between researchers of the Faculty of Fine Arts and the Faculty of Geological Sciences at the Complutense University (UCM, Madrid, Spain). The work, based on scientific dissemination through art, is framed in the theme “Climate change and Ocean Acidification” as part of the course “Art, Science and Nature” of the Master’s Degree in Research in Art and Creation (Faculty of Fine Arts, UCM). The team used recent sediment samples from Indian Ocean and Red Sea that contained healthy and unhealthy foraminifera specimens to create 3D specimen models. These models were made using traditional sculpture techniques, photogrammetry, and 3D printing to show different states of foraminifera dissolution and corrosion from ocean acidification. The end result of this project resulted in nine interactive pieces which were part of the exhibition “Drift & Migrate” open to the public during the month of November 2019 in the exhibition hall of the Faculty of Fine Arts (UCM). The 3D models of foraminifera were displayed with educational graphics and blind-accesible explanatory signage (Braille) to share the scientific facts of foraminifera and their role in the ocean ecosystem. The main objective of the collaboration is to raise awareness of anthropogenic effects on foraminifera and the marine ecosystems in general and to expand research opportunities between the arts and sciences at the university.
Cod is a keystone species in marine ecosystems. It shapes the conditions for a large number of other species in the sea and is also of great importance both economically and culturally. However, the Swedish Atlantic cod stocks are on the verge of collapse with serious population declines observed in the Baltic Sea and on the Swedish west coast. Will the already weakened stocks meet another challenge; climate change?
Cod swimming through seagrass meadow. Photo. Diana Hammar Perry
Research based on the latest climate models shows that the temperature will rise and lead to local heat waves. Ocean acidification will increase, and salinity will reduce in the Baltic Sea and part of the west coast. Together, these climate effects will dramatically alter the marine environment around Sweden.
Climate effects cause physiological stress
Each of these changes can cause physiological stress in marine organisms. In order to better understand the anticipated fate of cod in a changing climate, this project aims to investigate how Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua) from coastal populations in the Baltic Sea and the North Sea respond to the cumulative effects of climate change factors such as reduced salinity (freshening), reduced pH (ocean acidification) and increased temperature (warming events).
Researchers in the Marine Climate Change Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST), alongside those from the University of Tsukuba, the University of Ryukyus, the University of Palermo in Italy, and the French Institute for Research and Development (IRD) in New Caledonia, have been awarded core-to-core funding by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science to form the International CO2 & Natural Analogues Network (ICONA).
This network aims to create resources on using natural analogues to understand how ocean acidification will impact marine ecosystems. The funding goes from 2021 to 2026.
Prof. Timothy Ravasi, Principle Investigator in the Marine Climate Change Unit, explained how natural analogues mimic future environment. “These are volcanoes, tidal lagoons, or underwater vents that result in higher than average CO2 levels being present in the surrounding ocean. We can use these environments to investigate what the marine ecosystems might look like in the future given the projections for ocean acidification.”
This activity makes part of the ESA Ocean Science Cluster and contributes to the joint EC-ESA Earth System Science Initiative launched in February 2020 by the European Space Agency and the European Commission (EC) Directorate-General for Research and Innovation (DG RTD) to jointly advance Earth System Science and its response to the global challenges that society is facing in the onset of this century.
In particular, this activity is a contribution to the EC-ESA Flagship Action on Ocean Health aimed at developing advanced ocean observations and products and enhancing the scientific understanding of the ocean’s role in the Earth and climate system and its responses to management actions to contribute to reverse the cycle of decline in ocean health and improve conditions for sustainable development of the Ocean.
With this ITT ESA plans to launch up to three separate and independent contracts which will be run in parallel and address the following Themes:
Ocean acidification threatens our entire ecosystem. Yet, there is not much talk about it. The BALSAM project is launching a campaign to open people’s eyes to a phenomenon that can have drastic consequences for both nature and humans.
The BALSAM project aims to reach groups who share the environmental movement’s concerns about ocean acidification Photo: Henrik Trygg/imagebank.sweden.se
Carbon dioxide emissions cause not only climate change, but also ocean acidification. Corals, salmon, shrimp and shellfish, as well as the entire ecosystem, are at risk.
– Ocean acidification has sometimes been called the “equally evil twin of climate change”. Still, the awareness of ocean acidification is not as big as the awareness of, for example, the increase in temperature in the oceans, says Marko Reinikainen, project manager at AirClim.
Pilot project will develop new electrochemical approach to mitigate ocean acidification and enhance ocean-based carbon sequestration
Ocean Visions today announced an advisory relationship with The College of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Stony Brook University to pilot and evaluate a new approach aimed at mitigating ocean acidification and enhancing ocean carbon sequestration. The project, Safe Elevation of Alkalinity for the Mitigation of Acidification Through Electrochemistry (SEA MATE), will use electrochemistry to remove acids from the ocean.
During the 2021 phase of the pilot, SEA MATE will prototype an acid removal technique to combat ocean acidification. An additional anticipated benefit of the SEA MATE process is the capture of atmospheric carbon dioxide and its safe long-term sequestration in the ocean as bicarbonate. Ocean Visions has assembled an Expert Team to provide scientific review and guidance on the design of experiments, data analysis, hypothesis testing, and safe operating thresholds. The team will ultimately produce an independent evaluation of the overall potential of the approach, including environmental costs and benefits.
Objectives: The key objective of this proposal is to employ a state-of-the-art autonomous sensing swarm and leverage its mobility to obtain relevant measurements (temperature, pH, salinity) of the ocean surface (continuously optimally positioned sensors). The buoys communicate with each other and form an intelligent swarm that is capable of obtaining a more accurate reconstruction of an underlying environmental field than non-collaborative sensors or a small number of high-quality sensors could provide. The sensed data (temperature, pH, salinity), obtained at key areas tracking large gradients, will be provided to support multi-fidelity models to improve the prediction of ocean acidification in Mass Bay.
Methodology: We will use 30 fully instrumented autonomous mobile buoys as a part of a smart swarm system to measure surface temperature, salinity and pH data. The field tests will be conducted at Stellwagen Bank, MA, covering the area of 10~100 km^2 deployed for weeks at a time.
Rationale: Ocean acidification (OA) is threatening marine ecosystems and maritime food industry. Monitoring OA involves collecting data over a long period of time from a large number of measuring stations. Distributed systems are a cost-effective strategy for pervasive and persistent measuring and monitoring of environmental fields. They offer unparalleled system robustness, and with our proposed framework, would exhibit real-time collaborative distributed computing capabilities that would lead to much higher measured data quality.
This project began in April 2021 and is projected to end in September 2024.
Ocean acidification, resulting from changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, will impact how a variety of chemicals, including metals, behave in the environment. This could lead to increased uptake of metals in important species, such as blue mussels. Body burdens of pollutants in bivalves are important considerations for seafood safety and, as a result, aquaculture. We will explore these relationships both in the laboratory and the field, and produce a robust data set that will be useful to stakeholders in coastal management and aquaculture and provide the societal benefit of better informed aquaculture siting.
Abalone harvesting and consumption have a long history in California, but recreational and commercial fisheries have been forced to close due to overfishing, habitat destruction, harmful algal blooms, and unseasonably warm water temperatures. Red abalone aquaculture is the only remaining commercial abalone production method in the state, but as ocean acidification impacts coastal waters, there are widespread concerns that abalone aquaculture will also be impacted. Abalone appear to be vulnerable to ocean acidification, exhibiting shell damage and reduced growth in high carbonic acid conditions.
Previous research by the Co-PI’s has shown that growing abalone together with seaweed could help reduce carbon dioxide input into the water, hence buffering the acidity of the water and improving abalone growth and shell area. However, there are still questions as to whether this system also leads to improved shell calcification, which can reduce breakage and make both the meat and shell more marketable.
Proposal Request Synopsis The Ocean Foundation is seeking an institution (or partnership of institutions) in the Pacific Islands to serve as a regional training hub for ocean acidification for the broader Pacific Islands community. This request for proposals to host the hub is part of a larger project that seeks to build capacity in the Pacific Islands to monitor and respond to ocean acidification through the distribution of equipment, training, and ongoing mentorship. The Ocean Foundation hopes to work with the selected regional training hub to identify additional sources of funding and resources to support the hub in perpetuity, but is unable to guarantee more than the funding laid out below. The regional training hub will be a critical partner in this project and will play a role in sustaining ocean acidification monitoring and research in the region beyond the three-year time frame of this project. Eligibility and instructions to apply are included in this request for proposals. Proposals are due no later than April 1st, 2021 and should be sent to ioai@oceanfdn.org .
