Climate change has been at the top of the news lately. However, the carbon that has been heating up the atmosphere has also been acidifying the oceans. The oceans absorb the carbon and the product is carbonic acid.

The atmospheric changes such as higher temperatures, storms, droughts, floods, crop failures, and deaths from heat exhaustion are all visible and easily registered in the public’s mind.

However, the oceans have been changing without much notice until the last four or five years. Some scientists are now recognizing symptoms of this change. The mysterious deaths of coral reefs are now attributed to ocean acidification. Acid dissolves the calcium carbonate that are coral reefs.

Closer to home, marine biologist Robert Steneck of the University of Maine and the Darling Marine Center has said the shell disease that has been affecting lobster in southern New England for the last several years could very likely be a symptom of increased ocean acidity. The greater difficulty in forming shells in acidic water stresses the lobster’s system, including the immune system. The result is greater susceptibility to disease.

Mark Green, a professor of geology at St. Joseph's College in Standish, Maine, said recently, “If we knew what we now know about ocean acidification 10 to 15 years ago, the Copenhagen conference on climate change would instead be about ocean acidification.” It is, he said,“The other CO2 problem.”

Trees are commonly known as carbon filters and oxygen generators. Less known is the oxygen-generating power of phytoplankton in the world’s oceans. These tiny animals are at the base of the ocean food chain. They also have internal shells, which dissolve in sea water with elevated acidity.

These pteropods are not only critical to the ocean food chain, but they produce large quantities of oxygen for everything else living above the surface. Every other breath we take has been supplied by these tiny, dissolvable creatures.
Carbon dioxide is more soluble in cold water. Some Arctic areas have reached acidity levels that are dissolving the shells of larger mollusks.

The base line for normal has come from cores taken from a Russian glacier, the Vastok glacier. Cores taken there found 450,000-year-old air bubbles. The conclusion scientists drew from these ice core studies is that it has been tens of millions of years since carbon dioxide levels have been so high. Carbon dioxide levels have never been as high as they are now.

With 25 percent of the carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere being absorbed by the oceans, the acidity levels rise more every year. “The coral reefs are the canary in mine shaft earth,” said Steneck.

William Balch, senior research scientist at the Bigelow Laboratory in Boothbay Harbor, Maine, said that even if we stopped pumping CO2 into the atmosphere, chemical reactions have been disturbed and it would be perhaps tens of thousands of years before this process could be reversed.