World News Engine: Ocean Acidification May Be Worse In Three Handread Million Years

Ocean Acidification May Be Worse In Three Handread Million Years

Ocean Acidification May Be Worse In Three Handread Million Years.High levels of contamination can become the world's oceans acidic at a rate faster than at any time in the last 300 million years, with unknown consequences for future marine life, researchers said Thursday.Acidification can be worse than during the four largest mass extinctions in history when the natural impulses of carbon asteroid impacts and volcanic eruptions caused global temperatures to rise, said the study in the journal Science.
An international team of researchers from the U.S., Britain, Spain, Germany and the Netherlands examined hundreds of paleoceanographic studies, including fossils embedded in the seabed sediments for millions of years.
They found only once in history that came close to what scientists are seeing today in terms of mortality ocean life - a mysterious period known as the Paleocene Thermal Maximum-Eocene about 56 million years.
Although the reason for the increase of carbon then remains a source of debate, scientists believe that the doubling of harmful emissions leading to global temperatures about six degrees Celsius and caused great loss of life in the oceans.
The oceans are particularly vulnerable because they absorb excess carbon dioxide from the air that makes the water more acidic, a condition that can kill corals, molluscs and other reef organisms and shell.
"We know that life for the past events ocean acidification was not wiped out - new species evolve to replace those who died," said lead author Honisch catfish, a paleoceanographer Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University Earth.
"But if industrial carbon emissions continue at present, we can lose the organisms that interest us -. Coral reefs, oysters, salmon"Honish and colleagues said that the current rate of ocean acidification is at least 10 times faster than it was 56 million years."The geological record suggests that the current acidification is potentially unprecedented, at least in the last 300 million years of Earth history, and raises the possibility that we are entering uncharted territory of the changes in the marine ecosystem," said co-author Andy Ridgwell of the University of Bristol.
Environment Programme United Nations published a report in 2010 warned that carbon emissions from fossil fuels could have a greater risk to the marine environment than previously thought.
Rising acidity levels have an impact on life forms based on calcium, ranging from tiny organisms called ptetropods that are the primary source of food, crabs, fish, lobsters and corals, he said.
The UN report called for cuts in man, that CO2 emissions to reduce acidification and support for further work to quantify risk and identify species that might be more at risk.

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