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The "Deadly Trio" of Carbon Dioxide Threatens theWorld's OceansBy Lex Berko (/author/LexBerko)

Image via Wikimedia Commons (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Moofushi_bleached_corals.JPG).

Earth’s oceans are currently more acidic than they have been in at least 300 million years,according to a report (http://www.stateoftheocean.org/research.cfm) released today bythe International Program on the State of the Ocean (IPSO) (http://www.stateoftheocean.org/If that's the case, it's a condition that may have shoved us mostly unawares into the next greatextinction event.

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The IPSO researchers explain that acidification is one of three primary symptoms currentlythreatening our planet’s waters. The other two members of what they coined the “deadly trio”are ocean warming and deoxygenation. While all three have their own unique and detrimentaleffects on the ocean, they are all connected by a single source of causation: carbon dioxide.

Beyond their common carbon history, this triad is otherwise significant because “most, if not all,of the Earth’s five past mass extinction events have involved at least one of these threesymptoms of global carbon perturbations," reads the report (http://www.stateoftheocean.org/pdfs/IPSO-Summary-Oct13-FINAL.pdf). But how did it get this way?

While we’ve been scurrying to better understand climate change on land, the vast “buffer” thatis the world’s oceans has been absorbing excess carbon dioxide (http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/deep-parts-of-the-greenland-sea-are-warming-10-times-faster-than-the-entire-ocean). In asense, the organization writes (http://www.stateoftheocean.org/pdfs/IPSO-Summary-Oct13-FINAL.pdf), “it has been shielding us from the worst effects of accelerating climate change.”This might seem good for us land-dwellers in the short-term, but in the long term, as carbondioxide accumulates in the Earth’s waters, acidity increases, everything gets warmer, andoxygenation drops.

Higher acidity eats away at coral, which is in itself an ecosystem for other marine animals.Problems with coral mean problems for a whole collection of other marine organisms. “Atcarbon dioxide concentrations of 450-500 ppm (projected in 2030-2050) erosion will exceedcalcification in the coral reef building process, resulting in the extinction of some species andthe decline of biodiversity as well,” IPSO notes.

Over the last century, the ocean has warmed (http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/how-marine-life-is-responding-to-warming-oceans) 0.6 degrees Celsius. While it might not sound like a lot, itis already causing species to scatter and biodiversity to drop. Coral is also affected by warmingas well. Between that and acidification, IPSO predicts that coral reefs will be a thing of the pastby 2050.

And lastly, deoxygenation leaves us with dead zones (http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/a-dead-zone-the-size-of-new-jersey-is-growing-in-the-gulf-of-mexico), which have been doublingin number every decade since the 1960s. As the ocean’s oxygen levels decrease over the nextforty years by anywhere from one to seven percent, we can only expect these trends tocontinue.

The “deadly trio” isn’t the only grim matter about which IPSO seeks to warn us. In a series offive articles published in the Marine Pollution Bulletin (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/0025326X/74), IPSO researchers discuss a spectrum of anthropogenic repercussionsof our current relationship with the ocean. In one paper, the organization focuses on ourmisunderstanding and misuse of the high seas, a “frontier” region with resources that are beingexploited by the United States. In another, IPSO insists that we stop preemptivelycongratulating ourselves for making curtailing overfishing, because we still are faced withfrightening depletions of biodiversity.

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It’s a lot to process. While we already knew some elements of this report—that oceans areacidic (http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/the-rapidly-acidifying-arctic-ocean-wont-return-to-normal-for-thousands-of-years), that temperatures are rising (http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/how-marine-life-is-responding-to-warming-oceans), that dead zones(http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/a-dead-zone-the-size-of-new-jersey-is-growing-in-the-gulf-of-mexico) are becoming more common—the power of IPSO's research is that it shows to whatdegree acidity, warming, and deoxygenation are effecting the ocean. Its bleak conclusionsmirror those from the IPCC (http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/grim-21st-century-predictions-from-the-most-important-climate-report-in-6-years) report of last week. If this indeed representsthe current condition of our oceans, then we need to recalibrate our perspectives and realizethat “the future of humanity and the future of the ocean are intertwined.”

@heyiamlex (http://www.twitter.com/heyiamlex)

By Lex Berko (/author/LexBerko) 2 weeks agoTags: climate change (/tag/climate+change), acidification (/tag/acidification), deoxygenation (/tag/deoxygenation),oceans (/tag/oceans), environment (/tag/environment), science (/tag/science)

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