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Introduction:

Ocean acidification can’t just be looked at on a regional scale. The whole

world needs to come together and deal with this problem together because it is a

global issue. Ocean acidification has been a continuous problem that has

affected people all around the world. Ocean acidification is when carbon dioxide

is absorbed into the seawater, chemical reactions occur that reduce seawater

pH, carbon ion concentration, and saturation states of biologically important

calcium carbonate minerals (http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/co2/story/ What+is+

Ocean+Acidification%3F). Many of these marine organisms, not just the ones

with calcium carbonate shells, are being affected by ocean acidification.

One example of these organisms is the pteropod. These “sea butterflies”

are found throughout the ocean and are a major food source for fish and other

marine life. These pteropods have calcium carbonate shells that start to break

down with a decrease in pH. For pteropods, corals, and other species that

depend on shells and exoskeletons, ocean acidification will lead to a decreased

availability of dissolved calcium carbonate. These mineral structures may begin

to dissolve, depending on where they live in the ocean. (http://www.pmel.noaa

.gov/co2/story/Ocean+Acidification).

As the world’s oceans are becoming more acidic, food webs could be

severely impacted. Phytoplankton and zooplankton, like pteropods, form the

basis of most oceanic food chains; Coral reefs form the foundation of the most

diverse marine habitats; and shellfish, such as oysters and crabs support

economically important fisheries in many of the world coastal communities

(source). Many people depend on these species to make a living.

Ocean acidification is a problem that affects people around the globe. It is

not just a problem that some people can look the other way. If we are going to

ever change our oceans we need to start looking at what and how much of it we

are putting in. It’s not going to be an easy problem to fix, but if people across the

globe can come up with a solution, it is at least a step in the right direction. It

turns out that Maine actually passed a law a few weeks ago to study ocean

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acidification. Many supporters of the law are saying that it’s the first law of its

kind. The law will establish a commission to study and address ocean

acidification (http://www.pressherald.com/news/Maine_pa sses_law_

to_study_ocean_acidifi cation.html). These reasons, and many others, should

serve as a warning that if we don’t seriously address this issue now, then it could

really come back to haunt us in the future.

Background literature:

Ocean acidification has been a topic that many scholars have discussed.

One of the main topics being discussed is rapid climate change and its impacts

on the oceans. Ever since the industrial revolution, there has been an ongoing

increase of CO2 in our atmosphere. One ecosystem that is directly affected by

this is coral reefs. Many experiments have shown that if we were to double the

CO2 emissions we had during the industrial revolution it would decrease coral

reef growth by 40% (http://icriforum.org/about-icri/iyor). These coral reefs

provide one of the most biologically diverse and economically important

ecosystems. These problems are likely to have serious consequences through

their impact on coastal protection, fisheries, and tourism. Some of these

Caribbean countries can earn up to 50% of their GDP just based on tourism so

these problems with coral reefs are definitely hurting these countries

(http://icriforum.org/about-icri/iyor*).

A major problem that these studies have shown is that our atmospheric

CO2 levels are rising at a relatively quick rate. Today’s atmospheric CO2 levels

are at 380 ppmv (parts per million by volume) and is currently rising at a rate of

0.5% each year. This rate of change is approximately 100 times faster than any

other change in the past 650,000 years (Fabrey,2008). Reducing CO2 is the

most effective way to influence ocean acidification. Reducing these CO2

emissions will help further prevent problems while also helping out future climate

change (Kolieb,2012).

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Marine organisms that rely on calcium-carbonate shells and exoskeletons

for protection are being heavily affected. One of these organisms is a King Crab.

During a study, King Crabs and their larvae were held in water of acidity of 7.7

pH(0.3 less than the average pH levels). After the study was done it was shown

that the acidic water increased larva size and calcium content, the implications of

these increase were unclear. However, the increased acidity led to a decreased

survival rate that is likely to harm theses King Crab populations (Long, 2013).

Pteropods and carbs are highly affected by ocean acidification, but they

are only the tip of the iceberg. Ocean acidification doesn’t just affect one

organism; it affects the whole entire food web. A study conducted by Havenhand

in 2012 was on the food web in the Baltic Sea consisting of phytoplankton,

zooplankton, macrozoobenthos, cod and sprat. One problem with this study was

that it didn’t have a lot of data on micro-algae and phytoplankton, which are at

the very bottom of the food web. It turns out that ocean acidification doesn’t

really have an effect on cod and other fish. It seems likely that the effects of

ocean acidification on cod and herring will be small, although negative impacts

may be experienced in later larval stages (Havenhand, Jonathan. 2012. 637-

644).

Figure 1 (Havenhand, Jonathan. 2012. 637-644)

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Hypothesis:

My hypothesis for this paper is that we were going to find a lot of

information during my research. Ocean Acidification is a topic that seems like a

lot of people are talking about. Twitter is also a great source for people to share

and discuss data so during research, there should be many interesting findings.

Methods of data collection:

For collect the tweets for our data, we used a program called scraperwiki.

This software allowed us to be able to track all of our hash tags and see what,

who, where, etc. these tweets were coming from. In total, the number of tweets

#oceanacidification was able to pick up was 689. It was good to see that even

though not many people were tweeting about Ocean Acidification, it was still a

topic that people were talking all over the world about. Laura Kurgan writes,

“There is no such thing as raw data. Data is always translated such that they

might be represented”. This pertains to ocean acidification because every little

piece of data that these scientists get they use because they have such little data

already.

Analysis:

For the analysis of my research, we had to use many different programs

with different specialties. One of the tools we used was Social Explorer, which

allowed us to make a map with a variety of choices to choose from. Another tool

we used R. R allowed us to transfer data into R and then we would be able to

make different graphs out of them. It was actually pretty fascinating what we

were able to do in R. BatchGeo allowed us to see where our tweets, at least the

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ones we were able to see, were from. Another tool that we used was Wordle.

Wordle allowed us to see what words showed up most frequently and put them in

a word graph. The last tool we used was Gephi. Gephi *was used to analyze

large network groups and see the connections within a network. Edward Tufte

writes, “When we reason about quantitative evidence, certain methods for

displaying and analyzing data are better than others. Superior methods are more

likely to produce truthful, credible, and precise findings” (Tufte, 1997). For this

research BatchGeo and Gephi were two of the most crucial tools because they

told the best stories out of all the other graphs.

Findings:

There were many things that we found while doing our research. One of

the findings that we came across was that twitter users who used the hash tag

#oceanacidification were spread across the whole world as shown in figure 2.

Figure 2: Map of #oceanacidification tweets

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Fig 3: Percentage of people who attended college in 1970′s.

Fig 4: Percentage of people who attended some sort of college in the 1990′s

Fig 5: Percentage of people who attended some college or more in 2010.

When we were looking at Social Explorer and trying to figure out what we

should research, we thought that we should look at education. We figured with

ocean acidification growing over the years, places that heavily relied on fisheries

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in the economy would be good places to look for increases in education. A

couple places drew my interest, but we decided to go with Florida because we

know that Florida has a lot of fisheries. It was going to be interesting to see how

education has changed over time. My original hypothesis before looking at the

data was that the education level of the general public was going to

increase. Not necessarily because of the increase in Ocean Acidification, but

due to the fact that more and more Americans are attending Colleges and

Universities. As you can clearly see in the maps above, the education rose from

only being red regions into all blue and with some regions being dark blue. We

thought that this was a good selection of maps because it shows how more

people are going to college and even if they are not studying Environmental

Sciences, more people are becoming more educated about the problems that are

affecting the world. Hopefully, someday, we are able to solve these problems to

make the world a better place.

Figure 6: Wordle Graph

When we first started looking at my visualization, we was trying to find something

that popped out to me. We were searching through and came across a few

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words and phrases, but they really didn’t lead too much. However, one word that

was very interesting was NZOAW14. It turns out that it stands for the New

Zealand Ocean Acidification Workshop. It was a workshop that has taken place

in 2014, but it’s currently still going on. It turns out that this workshop has very

interesting facts about ocean acidification and is definitely a good place for

research. It’s very important that people are getting educated on this topic and

topics alike because they are very real problems that if we don’t start looking at

now, can really hurt US in the future!

Figure 7: Fish caught in metric tons from 1970-2010

Increasing ocean acidity is believed to have a range of direct consequences.

Some examples of these consequences are reduced metabolic rates in jumbo

squid; the increase in acidity breaks down shells of crabs, lobsters, clams,

oysters, etc. In the top left, we tracked 4 different marine organisms that are

affected by O.A. and how many metric tons of each species was caught each

year. King Crabs spiked in 1980 at 83,000 metric tons, but took a major drop-off,

which caused more sea urchins to be caught. There are many ups and downs in

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20000

40000

60000

80000

1970 1980 1990 2000 2010

Year

Me

tric

_T

ons

Fish_type

King_Crab

Sea_Urchins

Shellfish

Squid

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the graph because the pH levels in the water can change drastically in a short

time period.

What we wanted to see in my graph was if these individual countries have

been responding to this recent problem by decreasing their CO2 emissions.

When we first saw my data, every country in the world was on the list with their

CO2 emissions. We picked a few countries that we thought would be affected by

this crisis because those countries would probably show the most change over

time. After we did all our R computations, we came out with my finished

visualization. Out of the 5 countries that we looked at 3 of them showed no

significant change over time, which was great because they had very low CO2

emissions compared to the other countries. The 2 countries that we looked

closer at were USA and China. China’s CO2 emissions were fairly low in the

1960’s, but from 1965 on, China’s CO2 emission have been rising ever

since. Similarly, USA started at a decently high emission output in 1960, but it

hasn’t raised much over time.

Some of these countries have been fairly good with their CO2 emissions

while others have been pretty bad. USA and China don’t fairly represent the

whole worlds CO2 emissions because those 2 countries have some of the

highest CO2 outputs. If we are ever going to try and fix ocean acidification it

needs to start now and these countries such as USA and China need to

gradually cut back on their CO2 emissions.

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Figure 8: CO2 emissions from 1960-2010

Figure 9: Network analysis of twitter data

In my visualization, the nodes were a little further away then I was expecting. I

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suppose that would mean that a lot of people are not really communicating back

and forth with each other. One of the things I did notice was that there was one

central node that was connected to a bunch of other nodes. The person’s name

was donbeeman. Donbeeman wasn’t anyone special; he was just a guy on

twitter who liked to share his ideas with people. His tweets weren’t retweeted

that much, he would just reply to a bunch of tweets and then get a conversation

going. Another thing I did notice was that there was a bunch of people that were

in groups of 4-12 people that were talking about Ocean Acidification in their own

little groups.

In this visualization you can see that one person is very connected with

everyone else. I think that this graph demonstrates Alex Pentland’s quote,

“Digital technology enables us to study billions of individual exchanges in which

people trade ideas, money, goods, or gossip” (80). It might not be so clear

because my data wasn’t as big as other peoples, but this graph shows these

exchanges on a smaller scale.

(Fabricius,2013)

Figure 10: Ratios of the densities

Number of taxonomic units of macro invertebrates at high-CO2 relative to control

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sites (n = 35 surveys). Circles mark the estimated ratios, error bars show lower

and upper 95% CIs (see electronic supplementary material, tables S5 and S6).

Differences are significant (p < 0.05) if the error bars do not include the value 1.0.

Discussion:

When we were looking at the data, we wanted to come up with a story that

would try to best represent our data. A problem that we had with our data was

that there just simply wasn’t enough of it. We only received a total number of

689 tweets, which is very tough to analyze. One of the problems associated with

twitter is that there are only 140 characters for someone to write their thoughts.

For a topic like ocean acidification there are a lot of things that someone is

looking to say and this restriction could’ve prevented these people from tweeting.

This is what Boyd and Crawford had in mind when they said, “specialized tools of

Big Data also have their own limitations and restrictions.” We know that ocean

acidification is a worldwide problem so one of the first things we looked at was

where the tweets were coming from. In figure 2 you can see that a lot of the

locations are from the United States, but a bunch of other locations were

scattered across the world. This means that even though I didn’t receive a lot of

tweets on the topic, it was still being discussed worldwide.

So now that we know ocean acidification is a worldwide topic, the next

thing we wanted to see was if people are still talking about ocean acidification

even though they weren’t talking about it on twitter. The graph that we analyzed

to see this was my Wordle graph. At first, most of the words didn’t really lead to

anything special, but then we came across the name NZOAW14. This stands for

the New Zealand Ocean Acidification Workshop. This is basically a yearlong

discussion where people who want to learn or share their ideas come together

and discuss these issues. It was definitely good to see that people are coming

together to talk about these issues. As Crawford points out “only 16% of adults

use twitter.” This just shows us that the consensus opinion on twitter is not

necessarily how other people feel. That is why it is good to have workshops like

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this that bring people from all over the world together.

Many marine organisms have been extremely affected by ocean

acidification. With the ongoing increase of CO2, that seems to be not stopping

for a long time, we can probably infer that the conditions for marine life aren’t

going to get better. As you can see in figure 8, countries like China and the US

are producing more CO2 emissions than they ever have been. The current pH

level of the ocean is as low as it has ever been. Countries like the US and China

aren’t going to listen to some environmentalists give them some talk about a fish

situation.

One last graph we want to talk about is figure 7. In this graph there is a

huge spike in the total tons caught of crab, but all of a sudden there is a huge

decline. Could this be due to ocean acidification? Could it be due to low

offspring rates? There are many questions to this graph that we may never

know, but one thing we found interesting about this graph was right after the King

crab population decreased, there was a big increase in sea urchins. From what I

infer from this information is that fisheries kept fishing the crabs until they ran out

or there was some type of ecosystem change, such as ocean acidification, that

depleted these crab populations.

We don’t believe that it has come to the point yet where everyone needs

to start taking action. The day will come where our own negligence is going to

cause us to lose our oceans, just hopefully that day doesn’t come in the near

future. An interesting fact that I saw the other day was that the Earth is 4.6 billion

years old and if we scale that to 46 years, we as a population only have been

here for 4 hours. Our industrial revolution started one minute ago and in that

time we have destroyed more than 50% of our forests! Shocking! Now just

imagine what we could do to our oceans too.

Conclusion:

From my conclusion, ocean acidification is a problem that is not going to

leave us for a long time. People as a whole need to take more responsibility for

themselves and start caring about the world we live in. Remember this is not just

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a problem that affects individual groups of people, it affects the whole entire

world and we need to come together to get this problem fixed!!

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Works Cited

Alex Pentland, “The Data-Driven Society,” Scientific American 309, 4

(October 1, 2013): 80, accessed Feb. 2, 2014

doi: http://ereserves.bowdoin.edu/s14/intd2420/pentland_-

_the_data_driven_society.pdf

Boyd, Danah, and Kate Crawford. “Critical questions for big data:

Provocations for a cultural, technological, and scholarly phenomenon.”

Information, Communication & Society 15.5 (2012): 662-679. Fabry, V. J., Seibel, B. A., Feely, R. A., and Orr, J. C. 2008. Impacts of ocean

acidification on marine fauna and ecosystem processes. – ICES Journal of Marine Science, 65: 414–432.

Kate Crawford, “Think Again: Big Data,” Foreign Policy, May 9, 2013, pp.

2. K. E. Fabricius, G. De'ath, S. Noonan, and S. Uthicke

Ecological effects of ocean acidification and habitat complexity on reef-associated macroinvertebrate communities Proc R Soc B 2013 281: 20132479

Kurgan, Laura. 2013. “Representation and the Necessity of Interpretation.”

dddddIn Close up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics, 19-38.

Ocean acidification and climate change: synergies and challenges of addressing both under the UNFCCCEllycia R. Harrould-Kolieb, Dorothée Herr Climate Policy Vol. 12, Iss. 3, 2012

http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/co2/story/

http://www.pmel.noaa .gov/co2/story/Ocean+Acidification).

http://www.pressherald.com/news/Maine_passes_law_to_study_ocean_acidification.html

Tufte, Edward R. 2011 “Visual & statistical thinking: displays of evidence for

bbbbbbmaking decisions”

W. Christopher Long, Katherine M. Swiney, Robert J. Foy, Effects of ocean

acidification on the embryos and larvae of red king crab, Paralithodes

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camtschaticus, Marine Pollution Bulletin, Volume 69, Issues 1–2, 15 April

2013, Pages 38-47