Carl Zimmer of environment360 writes about some current studies whose findings point to the alarming reality of ocean acidification. The figures are clearly a warning sign.

If stomach acid has a pH of approximately 2 and pure water has 7, seawater at the ocean’s surface has a pH of about 8 to 8.3 pH units. But ‘when carbon dioxide enters the ocean, it lowers the pH by reacting with water. A hundred million years ago, there was over five times more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the ocean was .8 pH units lower.’

The numbers may seem insignificant if one misses the fact that ‘carbon dioxide concentrations changed very slowly over millions of years.’ The scenario has changed drastically since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Today, it is worse. ’We are flooding the atmosphere with carbon dioxide at a rate rarely seen in the history of our planet. The planet’s weathering feedbacks won’t be able to compensate for the sudden drop in pH for hundreds of thousands of years.’

Zimmer adds that ‘the carbon dioxide we have put into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution has lowered the ocean pH level by .1. That may seem tiny, but it’s not. The pH scale is logarithmic, meaning that there are 10 times more hydrogen ions in a pH 5 liquid than one at pH 6, and 100 times more than pH 7. As a result, a drop of just .1 pH units means that the concentration of hydrogen ions in the ocean has gone up by about 30 percent in the past two centuries.’

The result is alarming. When oceans absorb and store CO2, the chemistry of seawater changes, affecting marine life and altering marine biodiversity. A new study claims that ‘the seas are acidifying ten times faster today than 55 million years ago when a mass extinction of marine species occurred.’ The burning of fossil fuels changes ocean chemistry, causing danger and death to the oceans’ living creatures.

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Via environment360