Unlike some sexual processes in the animal world, coral reproduction remains a rather magical and mysterious event. And Dr Selina Ward loves it. The thousands of little red bundles of eggs and sperm are, she says, “beautiful”.

But at Heron Island Research Station, as she waits patiently for her corals to spawn, there’s now something more to Dr Ward’s research than simply untangling the mysteries of how corals release their egg and sperm bundles to the ocean currents.

Dr Ward, from the University of Queensland’s Centre for Marine Studies, is looking at how changes in the ocean’s chemistry – driven by increasing greenhouse gases – will affect the reproduction of corals and their ability to “settle” and build new reefs. And her preliminary results are not looking good.

When coral scientists first looked at the impact of global warming on reefs, they focused on rising sea temperatures and bleaching. This is still a concern and likely to impact large parts of the Great Barrier Reef, but the scientists now believe ocean acidification could be the process that will push the world’s reefs to the edge.



The oceans act as a big sponge for carbon dioxide produced by human industry. Since the industrial revolution, the oceans have soaked up about half of the greenhouse gases produced by humans. That carbon dioxide has reacted with the water, making the ocean more acidic. As the oceans’ pH levels drop, life becomes harder for organisms that rely on making calcium carbonate – such as corals and shell fish, and even tiny but important creatures such as krill.

Coral scientists are scrambling to understand what this process will mean for reef systems. Dr Ward’s colleagues, including well-known reef scientist Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, wrote a paper in 2007 showing that, as carbon dioxide levels increase, the worldwide area reefs can grow will shrink dramatically. Even at carbon dioxide levels of 450 and 500 parts per million (the atmosphere is now at 378 ppm) the area is very small, and does not include the Great Barrier Reef. This slide shows a graph of that work and the basic process of ocean acidification.

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Melissa Fyfe, Brisbane Times, 9 November 2009. Full article.

Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego honors His Serene Highness Prince Albert II of Monaco for his stewardship of the water planet.




YouTube, 2 November 2009. Video.

Too much CO2 can be threat to ocean life by making the water more acidic, making it more difficult for sealife to make their shells and skeletons. A very acid ocean will even dissolve the skeletons of corals and snails. Stanford University’s Dr. Steve Palumbi discusses the impact of an increasingly acidic ocean.



microdocs, 6 November 2009. Web site & video.

Prodcast from Scripps Institution of Oceanography (UC San Diego) about ocean acidification.



STUDIO 8, Science 360, 4 November 2009. Video.

One of the world’s leading coral reef scientists has slammed the Brumby Government’s proposal to export Victoria’s brown coal to India as “reckless vandalism”.

John “Charlie” Veron, who discovered a quarter of the world’s identified coral species, said any move to export the state’s vast reserves of brown coal would only further endanger the Great Barrier Reef.

“It’s reckless vandalism. Brown coal would have to be the dirtiest, nastiest form of energy there is. It is absolutely essential that it remains in the ground. That is obvious,” he told The Age.

The Sunday Age revealed in September that Energy Minister Peter Batchelor had championed in a Cabinet committee a 40-year proposal to export 12 million tonnes of brown coal to India. Mr Brumby has said that, given environmental approval processes, there is no reason why Victoria should not export its coal. “Australia exports oil, Australia exports gas, Australia exports black coal and Australia exports uranium,” he said. “So why you would single out brown coal and say you can’t export that?”

But Dr Veron, the Townsville-based author of the three-volume Corals of the World, said that avoiding every tonne of carbon dioxide was now crucial to save the world’s reefs. Moreover, he said science had now shown that corals will struggle to survive with the carbon dioxide levels already in the atmosphere.



High levels of carbon dioxide – the world is currently at 378 parts per million of carbon dioxide – have two impacts on corals. As the globe warms, so too does the sea, which sparks coral bleaching. But scientists now understand that the bigger problem is ocean acidification, when the chemistry of the ocean changes because of the large amounts of carbon dioxide they absorb from the atmosphere. These changes reduce the ability of reefs to form and regrow after bleaching events.

Mr Veron, who recently gave a talk on climate change and corals at the Royal Society introduced by Sir David Attenborough, said the current targets the world’s politicians are talking about – 450 and 500 parts per million – would leave only “a very small band of ocean left in which corals can live”.

“They will struggle just to exist, let alone build reefs,” said Dr Veron, who has clocked 7000 hours of diving research on coral reefs.

Brown coal, which drives 90 per cent of the state’s power supply, has been unsuitable for export because it is unstable and flammable. But proponents say recent developments in technology will allow them to dry the coal, making it less polluting – equal to black coal – and safe to transport.

The company behind the plan to export brown coal to India, Exergen, is hopeful the Government will give it access to a new release of brown coal. The company expects to earn $700 million a year in export income for Victoria.

Melissa Fyfe, The Age, 9 November 2009. Article.

Dr. Ken Caldeira, of the Carnegie Institution of Washington provided a balanced look at the potential benefits and also the costs and possible harm that geoengineering techniques could offer in our quest to find a “Magic Bullet” to counter global warming.

Can global warming be mitigated by a technological fix such as injecting light-blocking particles into the atmosphere or chemically “scrubbing” excess greenhouse gases from the atmosphere? Department of Global Ecology scientist Ken Caldeira addressed this question in his testimony to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science and Technology in a hearing titled “Geoengineering: Assessing the Implications of Large-Scale Climate Intervention” on November 5, 2009.

Caldeira testified that climate change poses a real risk to Americans and that the surest way to reduce this risk is to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. But other options, such as geoengineering approaches, may also cost-effectively contribute to risk reduction in certain circumstances.Solar Radiation Management (SRM) approaches seek to reduce the amount of climate change by reflecting some of the sun’s warming rays back to space. Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) approaches seek to reduce the amount of climate change and ocean acidification by removing the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.



The most promising SRM proposals appear to be inexpensive, can be deployed rapidly, and can cause the Earth to cool quickly. But they do not address the root causes of our climate problem or the problem of ocean acidification. Examples of SRM include injecting particles into the atmosphere or whitening clouds over the ocean to reflect incoming solar radiation. While SRM approaches may reduce overall climate risk, they may also introduce additional environmental and political risk.

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Roger Greenway, Reuters, 6 November 2009. Full article & more information.

Scientists working on the EU-funded CARBOOCEAN project have reiterated calls for a greater reduction of man-made carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Current targets are not strict enough, they argue, as contrary to popular belief, their findings show how the regional carbon sinks in the North Atlantic and Southern Ocean that take up more CO2 than they release are not stable and have decreased in nearly a decade.

Higher atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations will accelerate ocean acidification and diminish the effectiveness of marine carbon sink areas, new EU-funded research shows. The CARBOOCEAN (‘Marine carbon sources and sinks assessment’) project, supported under the ‘Sustainable development, global change and ecosystems’ Thematic area of the EU’s Sixth Framework Programme (FP6), reveals that finding and quantifying the CO2 in the oceans, and understanding how it got there is key. Backed by more than EUR 14 million in funding, the CARBOOCEAN project finds that overestimating the ocean’s ability to act as a sink can be vital when policy is under development.



In the same way that medicine needs a diagnosis and prognosis, so must the ocean’s ability to absorb CO2, according to the project partners who are from Europe, Morocco and the US. ‘Observations need to be made, and all realistic prognostic climate simulations are dependent upon a correct quantification of the ocean’s ability to act as a sink for CO2,’ the consortium said. Central to this is determining the role the ocean plays in CO2 uptake and in sink formation. By identifying the role, researchers could develop realistic climate simulations in the future.

‘Of all the CO2 that we’ve emitted into the atmosphere from burning of oil and gas, coal and trees and so on, 50% of it is in the ocean somewhere, and dissolved in the ocean, and so the goal we had is to find it,’ explained Professor Douglas Wallace of the German Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences (IFM-GEOMAR), a CARBOOCEAN partner.

For her part, Dr Ute Schuster, a senior research associate at the University of East Anglia, UK, said: ‘We are relying on that uptake by the oceans. If the oceans take up less, more is staying in the atmosphere, and that would accelerate climate change. So the fear is [that] if the North Atlantic, which is one of the biggest uptakes in the world, is taking up less and less, it would increase climate change, [and] speed up climate change to a large degree.’

By using time series measurements, as well as surface and deep section measurements, CARBOOCEAN has found that seawater is becoming more acidic. According to the partners, organic and inorganic carbon cycles, and marine organisms with calcareous shells are impacted by this increase.

The database being developed by CARBOOCEAN will help researchers quantify the carbon sinks that are in the oceans. Moreover, it will fuel collaborative data reporting.

In another development, the CARBOOCEAN spin-off EPOCA (‘European project on ocean acidification’), is investigating how changes in carbonate chemistry are affecting the oceans.

The CARBOOCEAN consortium underlines that goodwill is not enough to save the world from the effects of climate change. Fuelling human knowledge about how anthropogenic emissions affect the climate by warming up the atmosphere is vital. CO2 is the most significant and manageable agent for climate change, the researchers say.

For more information, please visit:

CARBOOCEAN:
http://www.carboocean.org

Related stories: 31015

Category: Project results
Data Source Provider: European Commission
Document Reference: Based on a European Commission press release
Subject Index: Climate change & Carbon cycle research; Coordination, Cooperation; Policies; Resources of the Sea, Fisheries

CORDIS News, 6 November 2009. Article.

As a native New Englander, I know full and well how much we depend on the oceans. They have often been a solution for our problems.

They’ve been a highway for goods and people, connecting us to the world, and a barrier against foreign invasion, protecting us from the world; a source of food and wealth, going back to our earliest beginnings, when whale oil lit our houses and when cod were so plentiful that huge specimens were commonly stacked like cordwood on our docks and wharves, and still there were so many that you could almost walk on their backs across some harbors.

Until the recent unrelenting hammering by our technologically impressive, very efficient, very destructive commercial fishing fleets, the seas have seemed an inexhaustible cornucopia of sea life for our sustenance, delight and wonder.

Now, science tells us the global wild fish catch is, for the first time in history, declining. Fortunately, we also know what steps our governments need to take to reverse this trend — steps that can again return our seas to abundance.

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Carbon dioxide combines with seawater to create carbonic acid, raising the acidity of that vast solution and reducing the amount of available carbonate. And that is serious mischief for all kinds of sea life, from corals and pteropods, continuing on through shellfish, clams, oysters, lobsters, mussels and so on, which need carbonate to make the structures that support them.



A chain reaction begins. Even creatures whose own structural parts might better survive a decrease in available carbonate in sea water depend to one degree or another on critters with higher sensitivity. Whales and salmon eat pteropods for dinner. The very tasty and much-prized Alaskan pink salmon makes pteropods 45 percent of its diet.

Many kinds of fish need corals for habitat. And corals aren’t just tropical — the colder the water they live in, the more vulnerable they are to changes in the availability of carbonate.

The current acidification level hasn’t been seen for at least 800,000 years, and acidification is coming on 100 times faster than at any point for hundreds of thousands for years. The levels are alarming. The rate of change makes them even scarier, because it so restricts the ability of sea creatures to adapt.

In contrast to the debate that continues about the causal relationship between this or that weather event and human activity, there is no debate about the source of ocean acidification. The change in the chemistry of the ocean is a man-made event, plain and simple, and the consequences of its continuing rise in acidity will belong squarely to us.

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Sam Waterston, CNN, 2 November 2009. Full article.

– Germany launches First National Research Programme on Ocean Acidification –

September 2009 / Kiel. Carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels are not only affecting our atmosphere, they are also changing our oceans on a global scale. Only a few years ago, marine scientists first registered a shift in the chemistry of seawater that raised their concern. The oceans, habitat of the largest continuous ecosystem on our planet, were becoming more acidic. Ongoing studies are demonstrating alarming consequences for many marine life forms, from tiny plankton, molluscs, fish, coral reefs up to whales. Many species will be challenged in their very survival. Under the umbrella of the new research programme BIOACID, more than 100 scientists and technicians from 14 German research institutes and universities are dedicating fact-finding missions over the next three years towards a better understanding of ocean acidification and its repercussions for life in the sea.

BIOACID – the name of the new research programme stands for Biological Impacts of Ocean ACIDification. The German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) is funding this high-profile focus in the marine sciences with a sum of 8.5 million Euros. Prof. Ulf Riebesell, marine biologist at IFM-GEOMAR and coordinator of the joint project, is looking forward to the challenge: “The funding of BIOACID demonstrates the emphasis Germany places on understanding the effects of climate change on the oceans. We are in the fortunate position of carrying research in the field of ocean acidification to new dimensions and are very excited about the prospects ahead.”



In the framework of BIOACID, marine biologists, chemists, and physicists will work together with molecular biologists, palaeontologists, medical researchers, and mathematicians to investigate various aspects of ocean acidification. In the field of marine technology, engineers will develop precise analytical techniques. The research activities will focus on the North and Baltic Seas, as well as on regions in which marine ecosystems are most affected by ocean acidification, such as the Polar Regions and the Tropics. BIOACID has initially been funded for three years.

The BIOACID research community will cooperate closely with their colleagues in other countries such as the United Kingdom and the USA, which are also developing national research programmes with a focus on ocean acidification. “The changes we are seeing are of such relevance for marine life worldwide, that we would like to move forward in a concerted effort to develop complementary research programmes”, says Ulf Riebesell. German scientists have also played a leading role in the development and implementation of the European Project on OCean Acidification entitled EPOCA, which has started in May 2008.

Project partners:
Coordination: Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences (IFM-GEOMAR), Kiel
Alfred-Wegener-Institute for Polar and Marine Research, Bremerhaven
Christian-Albrechts-University zu Kiel
Heinrich-Heine-University, Düsseldorf
Jacobs-University, Bremen
Leibniz-Institut für Gewässerökologie und Binnenfischerei, Berlin
Leibniz-Institut für Ostseeforschung Warnemünde
Max-Planck-Institut für Marine Mikrobiologie, Bremen
PreSens Precision Sensing GmbH, Regensburg
Ruhr-University Bochum
University Bremen
University Hamburg
University Rostock
Westfälische Wilhelms – University Münster

Links:
http://bioacid.ifm-geomar.de

Contact:
Prof. Ulf Riebesell (Scientific Coordinator), Tel. 0431 600-4444, uriebesell@ifm-geomar.de
Dr. Michael Meyerhöfer (Project office), Tel. 0431 600-4214, mmeyerhoefer@ifm-geomar.de

The Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) at the University of California in San Diego (http://scripps.ucsd.edu) invites faculty applications (tenure track to tenured) to fill one or more positions in one or more of the fields listed below. We seek motivated, broad-thinking scientist-educators to establish vigorous research programs and provide intellectual leadership in their fields while complementing existing expertise at Scripps, other UCSD departments, and nearby institutions. SIO is a world renowned center of marine research with approximately 200 principal investigators leading research programs on all aspects of earth, ocean and atmospheric sciences.



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Ocean acidification

SIO invites applications at the Assistant, Associate or Full Professor level in the area of Ocean Acidification. Individuals with interests in the impacts of acidification on ocean life and ecology are encouraged to apply. The successful candidate will be interested in developing a multidisciplinary research program and coordinating with colleagues at Scripps and elsewhere, in addition to being committed to engaging students at both the undergraduate and graduate level.

More information