Ocean exploration as vital as our reach into outer space

When the lunar module Eagle landed on the moon 40 years ago, I was in Denver with my five sisters, mom and dad watching the blurry, ghostly images of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin tentatively walk on a barren sea called Tranquility. The excitement in our living room was palpable. The seemingly impossible goal that President Kennedy charted out eight years before had just happened. I felt emboldened, empowered and infused with the notion that anything is possible.

The previous summer I experienced my own exploration awakening, having the opportunity to study invertebrates at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass. As a Colorado native, I was astounded to discover a wealth of life in oceans. It was a world filled with incredible diversity of forms and functions, from seastars to lobsters to exotic small creatures, many of whose daily rhythms were profoundly linked to the far away moon and its influence on the Earth’s tides.

The Apollo triumph had an unexpected impact on how we view our oceans. It energized a new focus on the vast unexplored regions of our own home planet. And through iconic images like the Apollo 8 “Earthrise photo,” an entire generation was inspired to cherish and protect our planetary home, which from the perspective of space is an ocean-dominated world.

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Last month, a government report detailed the danger that climate change poses to oceans and coastal areas. Ocean acidification, resulting from the uptake of carbon dioxide by ocean waters, is harming corals, shellfish, and other creatures. Warmer ocean waters are stressing corals, causing systems to move to new places and enhancing diseases. Climate change is leading to greater coastal erosion and stronger storm surges. These changes complicate efforts to protect oceans and coasts already under heavy stress from pollution, overfishing and habitat destruction.

A changing ocean seen with clarity

The Hawaiian archipelago, the most remote group of islands on Earth, has long been associated with the world’s most recognizable image of global change. The Mauna Loa atmospheric CO2 record, begun in March 1958 by Charles David Keeling, shows with startling clarity the saw-tooth pattern of the seasonal changes of land vegetation, and the still astonishing, dominating, rise forced by fossil fuel burning which is rapidly changing our world. Within perhaps only 5 years the peak in the annual signal atop Mauna Loa will touch the 400 ppm by volume mark, which would have been inconceivable to scientists of the first half of the twentieth century. But there is one huge and environmentally critical signal that is not easily seen in the “Keeling curve,” and that is the oceanic uptake of fossil fuel CO2. In this issue of PNAS, Dore et al. (1) document with great clarity the changes in ocean CO2 chemistry and pH occurring in the ocean in the waters off Hawaii from fossil fuel CO2 invasion.