The oceans are heating, acidifying and choking New Scientist, 04 October 2013 by Fred Pearce We know the oceans are warming. We know they are acidifying. And now, to cap it all, it turns out they are suffocating, too. A new health check on the state of the oceans warns that they will have lost as much as 7 per cent of their oxygen by the end of the century. The cascade of chemical and biological changes now under way could see coral reefs irreversibly destroyed in 50 to 100 years, with marine ecosystems increasingly taken over by jellyfish and toxic algal blooms.The review is a repeat of a study two years ago by the International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO), a coalition of scientists. It concludes that things have become worse since the first study. "The health of the oceans is spiralling downwards far more rapidly than we had thought, exposing organisms to intolerable and unpredictable evolutionary pressure," says Alex Rogers at the University of Oxford, the scientific director of IPSO. Deadly trio Rogers describes a "deadly trio" of linked global threats. The first is global warming: surface sea water has been warming almost as fast as the atmosphere. The second is acidification – a result of the water absorbing ever more CO2 from the atmosphere. The third is deoxygenation.......newscientist/article/dn24351-the-oceans-are-heating-acidifying-and-choking.html#.UlByOdJwonE
Posted on: Sun, 06 Oct 2013 06:39:43 +0000