Ocean Acidification Part 1:
What is ocean acidification?

Richard Feely: The process of burning fossil fuels – coal and oil and natural gas -- over the last two hundred years has released about five hundred billion metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere as carbon.

You might think of it this way: We’re releasing right now about seventy million tons of CO2 every day into the atmosphere. And about a third of that, about twenty million tons of CO2, is being absorbed regularly by the oceans. And that ocean uptake then of twenty million tons of CO2 has caused, over the last two hundred years or so, about a .1 pH change. pH is a logarithmic scale just like the Richter Scale. So a .1 pH change represents about a thirty percent increase in the overall acidity of the oceans. So the oceans has dropped its pH so far from about 8.2 to about 8.1.

Using present day scenarios of CO2 emissions, we might expect to see a further pH drop of about .3 to .4 pH units, which would mean an increase in acidity of another hundred and fifty to two hundred percent. This is a dramatic change in the acidity of the oceans. And it has a serious impact on our ocean eco systems; in particular, it has an impact on any species of calcifying organism that produced a calcium carbonate shell.

[End of segment]