In this podcast Melanie Boylan chats with Manuel Bustelo and Alana Alvarez Vernice about their ongoing mission to highlight ocean acidification. Listen in to find out how you can help to make everyday changes to improve our planets oceans.
The Sustainable Tour is DAN EU’s project to raise awareness of the need to drastically reduce our CO2 emissions if we want to maintain a healthy ocean. Manu and Alana are touring Europe and its surroundings (UK and Ireland in 2022) in an electric vehicle – recharging it only with renewable energy – visiting dive centres and other interested parties to give lectures on ocean acidification.
The ocean is a critical piece of the climate change puzzle. It’s estimated that the ocean has absorbed about one third of the excess CO2 humans have added to the atmosphere and more than 90% of trapped heat in the atmosphere. So, today, we’re going underwater to talk about the ocean and climate change with renowned marine biologist Dr. Sylvia Earle.
Dr. Sylvia Earle is an Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society. She is former chief scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and founder of Mission Blue, an organization aimed at restoring health and productivity to the ocean. Dr. Earle has led more than a hundred expeditions, logged over 7,000 hours underwater, and has authored more than 190 scientific, technical, and popular publications.
For more episodes of TILclimate by the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative, visit tilclimate.mit.edu. For the episode transcription and links to resources mentioned in the episode, visit https://climate.mit.edu/podcasts/til-…
Oceans are the most acidic they’ve been in 26,000 years, according to the World Meteorological Organization. That can impact the development of shellfish, like the ones fishermen depend on for income. Joe Raedle/Getty Images
At Whiskey Creek Shellfish Hatchery on the Oregon coast, baby oysters are hatched, raised, then sold to oyster farms throughout the Pacific Northwest.
“Our pumps pump in about 200 gallons a minute of seawater into the hatchery,” said production manager Alan Barton.
The seawater comes in, gets treated and goes into tanks where the oysters are hatched. Barton grows vats of green and brown algae to feed them. Back in 2007, after nearly 30 years of doing this without incident, something started to go wrong.
“Just month after month after every group of larvae dying one after another,” Barton said. Entire crops of baby oysters — normally swimming around — just died.
“We thought the causes were things like bacteria, disease,” he said. So they treated the water for bacteria.
“[In] 2008, with all these sophisticated treatment systems in place, we essentially lost all the larvae in the entire hatchery — $100,000 worth of product — and all just went to the bottom, all within 48 hours or so,” he said.
More acidic water, more problems
The cause, it turned out, was the water itself. More acidic water from deeper in the ocean was upwelling into their water source, driven by seasonal winds.
The lower pH water, meaning it was more acidic, was driving changes in the mineral composition of the water and killing the oyster babies. Deeper water is naturally more acidic than surface water, and upwelling is a natural event. But human-caused emissions are increasing the background level of acidity and appear to have tipped those natural conditions just past what the oyster larvae could bear.
Webinar speaker: Dr. Eric Mortenson, Postdoctoral Researcher at Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), Hobart, Australia
Description: The Southern Ocean accounts for nearly half of the global ocean’s sink of anthropogenic carbon. Despite this important contribution, many climate models do not represent the mesoscale features that characterize the region due to limited spatial resolution. Here we apply a high-resolution ocean model that incorporates biogeochemistry with high-emission (RCP8.5) forcing in order to identify regions of pronounced change due to carbon uptake into the near future. We find that the annual uptake of carbon in the Southern Ocean south of 40° S is projected to double over the first half of the 21st century. The changes due to the increase in carbon will lead to acidification and lowering of aragonite saturation. We will present regions where changes to carbon system variables are respectively more and less pronounced to inform the siting of near-future observations.
The GOA-ON webinar series has four sponsoring organizations:
(1) GOA-ON, the Global Ocean Acidification Observing Network,
(2) NOAA, the United States National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration,
(3) IAEA OA-ICC, the International Atomic Energy Agency – Ocean Acidification International Coordination Centre, and
(4) IOC-UNESCO – the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization For more information, please visit www.goa-on.org
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