Human Activity Increases Ocean Acidification

More evidence of ocean acidification has surfaced, after a team from MIT and WHOI have been able to link the increase of carbon dioxide in the air and the levels of ocean acidification.

Ocean acidification is a process that has an effect on the way ocean some creatures live, and it is being spurred on by human greenhouse gas emissions.

The increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is acidifying the ocean, which prevents ocean animals, like some snails, from forming their shells.

Widening Scope

The effect on shells was the original goal of the research, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans. The researchers wanted to see how this acidification was affecting sea snails called pterapods.

However, the research quickly expanded into focusing on the increase of acidification in the Pacific Northeast. This region, from the Alaskan Aleutian islands to the southern tip of California, is the end of the Pacific currents, and where most of its naturally-occurring dissolved carbon goes. So, the pH level there is naturally more than waters may be elsewhere.

A previous study in 2001 allowed a comparison in how much the acidification has changed. By using statistical models to predict how much dissolved carbon should be in the water, the researchers determined how much of it was due to CO2 in the atmosphere. It turned out that these rates were comparable to the rates of atmospheric carbon emission.

The good news, for now, is that the increase of  11 micromoles per kilogram can easily be accommodated by the ocean. “It would take hundreds of thousands of years for the ocean to absorb the majority of CO2 that humans have released into the atmosphere,” says lead scientist Sophie Chu in a statement. “But at the rate we’re going, it’s just way faster than anything can keep up with.”

Source: Futurism

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• Pollutants
• Pollution
• Climate Change
• Oceanographic Survey
• Carbon Emissions

1 Comment

1. The serious problem of humanity is the inability to design the overall environmental solutions. Researchers are not plant designers and multinationals know only design single-issue projects, since they are also specialized in particular areas; while public planning that should take care of these problems do not  exist not even to implement the solutions of private  inventors that study creative solutions without business interests, particularly open to public interventions. This has led to achieve incomplete installations both from the point of view depurative that energy that are warming the planet. The only concrete example of scientific organization of global environmental work is reported in http: //www.spawhe, but all policy makers, scientific and business owners, who are responsible for global warming, pretends not to understand the solutions because it is start all over again. The proposals are silent as if they did not exist. Spawhe, also addressed the serious problems created to the oceans, particularly in the following article http://www.spawhe.eu/the-sustainable-future-of-environment-energy-food-and-labour/ of which show some steps: The world's leading authorities environment and the economy, if not make the first step, by funding the global systems of SPAWHE and issuing regulations governing proper environmental planning, can not pretend that it is the market and the search for partners among professionals private works, specialized in individual areas, especially trade, to incorporate issues that go far beyond the task of entrepreneurs.

   I shall offer two projects that are key to the exploitation of ocean resources and to combat global warming.

   Italian demand patent N. 102016000058416 del 07/06/2016

   FLOATING SYSTEM WITH EXTRUDED POLYETHYLENE PIPES, RIBBED, REINFORCED AND FILLED WITH POLYSTYRENE.

   Abstract

   The significant delay in the development of the exploitation of marine resources and the protection of global environment is due to many factors, among them the lack of economic floating systems and unsinkable. However, such systems could not be studied in detail without also provide technical solutions that can lead to colonization by mass of ocean flat. In fact, at present, it does not make sense this colonization, being inhospitable ocean flat for human life, both because water desalination is not sustainable, both because from the point of view of food, the ocean flat are not productive. The fish production is concentrated in areas close to the coast, where the wind and water currents allow the production of phytoplankton and zooplankton, and thus the production of food for the great variety of fish species and for men.  However, the ocean flat could become the most rich source of human nutrition, because the invention of “Floating system, hydroelectric, desalter, extractor of calcium and carbon from marine deep water.” allow to desalinate, produce energy and abundance of fish at the same time, raising to the surface a part of the deep water, rich in calcium and carbon, dissolved by high hydrostatic pressures. These plants will produce phytoplankton, zooplankton and alkalinity, also fighting water acidification and global warming. In this project have been incorporated extruded ribbed polyethylene pipes, filled with polystyrene, to make unsinkable plants. Of course, it must also be made unsinkable floating islands and connecting roads that will serve around these plants. Therefore, even though the valid existing flotation systems used for the construction of marine shipyards, should give place to a large series productions that can be only realizing them by extrusion. Even sea transport of these tubes must be sustainable and economic, by assembling, in shipyards major floating structures and bulky and transporting them in place by tugboats.

   Italian demand patent N. 102016000058018 del 07/06/2016

   FLOATING SYSTEM, HYDROELECTRIC, DESALTER, EXTRACTOR OF CALCIUM AND CARBON FROM MARINE DEEP WATER.

   Abstract

   The state of the art in the development of desalination and demineralization treatment of marine and brackish water has been affected, along with industrial systems, purification, energy, food and protective of the environment, the absence of synergies between the pumps and hydraulic turbines and from the incorrect approach with the gravitational force, which must not be won by the hydraulic lifting but sustained, with one-way movement of water, especially in the gravitational direction, in the sea, in large basins, in open tanks. With simply overturned pumps coupled to the turbines can produce low-cost all the energy you need; continuing the descent and ascent of water in deep waters, for the venturi effect, we can suck and lift small percentages of deep water with high calcium and carbon percentage solubilized in them, that arrived at the surface, producing phytoplankton and alkalinity, increasing the abundance of fish and combating acidification and global warming;

   while on the floating platform, made with extruded and ribbed tubes made of low density polyethylene, blown in them polystyrene foam to make them unsinkable, with the triple synergy between the dual fuel pumps, turbines and the marine water recycling, by applying known hydraulic principles for centuries, as that of communicating vessels, the laws of Bernoulli and Pascal, placing, strategically, the electric double suction pump between a high positive hydraulic head and the turbines, we can desalinate large quantities of water, simply transforming a vertical tube in a ionic exchanger and recycling pipes and mixing in the energy producers, while the anionic and cationic synthetic resins, circulating contained in perforated polyethylene spheres as sieves. These spheres, floating climbing ion exchanger and descend for gravity emptying water in downhill tubes. By means of diverters change the path compared to the flow to be immersed in the washing tanks and regeneration of the resins, and reinserted again, indefinitely, in ion exchange circuit without interruption of the desalination cycle and energy production and without costs for heating the water or replace the membranes. If we want to exploit the immense riches of the sea, floating solutions have no alternative. The systems must be designed supported from above, since it cannot exist electromechanical equipment that can work to the abyssal depths. The sustainability of global systems is not only based on high technologies and special materials but above all on the physical basic principles, chemical, hydraulic and mechanical.