Ocean Acidification (and Other Terrible Things)

Swim out past the breaker, watch the world die.

Photo by Mohamed Nohassi on Unsplash

Climate change is coming for the ocean.

The scientific consensus is that life on Earth began in the ocean. We are doing our damnedest to make sure it ends there.

We depend on the ocean so much, and it is so far away from most of us, that we don’t think about it. It is time to start thinking about it.

Do you like breathing? Plankton in the ocean produces about half the oxygen we breathe.

Do you like seafood? Ocean.

Jobs for hundreds of millions of people? Ocean.

If we kill the ocean, we kill ourselves. If we kill the ocean, we lose over half our oxygen, we lose about 15% of the protein humanity eats, and jobs for about 600 million people.  If we kill the ocean, we can’t work, we can’t eat, and we can’t breathe. Yes, we could get buy as a species with less work, less food, and less oxygen. But let’s not try that.

During the Permian Extinction about 250 million years ago, Earth lost about 90% of its species, and 96% of life in the ocean. There are many similarities between the Permian and today including climate change, biodiversity loss, and ocean acidification. We shouldn’t be gambling with life on Earth that echoes the Permian. But we are.  

Ocean acidification.

The ocean absorbs about 25 – 30 percent of the CO2 that we put in the atmosphere. Great deal you say, another carbon sink we can rely on. Nope, it’s not that easy.

Yes, the ocean can absorb tons of CO2. But that comes with a price. This CO2 is turning the ocean acidic.

We are slowly turning the oceans acidic through climate change. That pH scale you forgot about from high school is a good indicator of ocean health. In chemistry, the “potential of hydrogen,” or pH, scale is used to specify the acidity or basicity of a solution. Acidic solutions are measured to have lower pH values than basic or alkaline solutions. For example, you and I are slightly basic, as our blood has a pH of about 8.0.

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The current average pH of the ocean is about 8.1. This is slightly basic (alkaline), but it has decreased from pre-industrial levels of about 8.2 due to increased absorption of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This number is an average. Different parts of the ocean will be more acidic or more basic. The rate of ocean acidification is ramping up. The sea is expected to have a pH of about 7.8 by the end of the century if current trends continue. If the sea becomes too acidic, life in the ocean may fall off a cliff.

Many ocean organisms have shells or skeletal structures made of calcium carbonate, which will begin to dissolve if the ocean becomes too acidic. These organisms make up a key part of the ocean food web. If these organisms go away, so will the things that eat them, and the things that eat those things.

The physical warming of the ocean creates a similar problem. Though the migration of whales over thousands of miles gets all the glamor shots in ocean nature documentaries, most ocean animals don’t take such ridiculous road trips to mate and feed. Gray whales can travel from 10,000 – 12,000 miles from their breeding grounds off of Baja California to their feeding grounds near Alaska. Showoffs.

But most ocean animals live in a relatively well-defined temperature niche that hasn’t changed much over thousands or tens of thousands of years. These animals and fish can’t adapt quickly if a temperature niche or food source changes drastically in a short time period.  But things are changing fast. Too fast. Scientists estimate that more than 80 percent of marine life on the planet has or is migrating to different places and changing their breeding and feeding patterns due to warmer ocean temperatures. This is having a similar impact as ocean acidification. It is messing up the food web. When one species moves, species that depended on it for food or other relationships will need to adapt or perish. Many will perish.

Moving beyond warming, fertilizer run-off, animal waste, and human-produced chemical runoff are producing more and longer-lasting algae blooms along coastal areas. These explosions in algae produce oxygen while they are alive, but when they die and decompose, they can use up all the oxygen and produce large dead zones where fish cannot survive because they cannot breathe. Just last week, scientists estimated that the dead zone off the coast of Texas and Louisiana in the Gulf of Mexico has grown to the size of New Jersey. (Insert your own New Jersey dead zone jokes here). New Jersey isn’t the biggest state but take a look at a map of the US. Now superimpose New Jersey in the Gulf of Mexico. That’s no small dead zone. And it’s growing. And we are the ones that did that.

The fish that are left, well we are overfishing those. The number of overfished fish stocks has tippled in the last half century, and now about one in three of the world’s fisheries are seen to be at or beyond their physical limits. Now consider that about ten percent of the world’s population depends on fisheries for their livelihoods and about half of the people on Earth depend on fish for 15 percent of their animal protein.

One last problem. Plastic.

Unless we make drastic changes to how we manage our oceans, plastic in the ocean could triple by 2040 and there will be more plastic than fish in the ocean by 2050.[1] Microplastics – small tiny parts of plastic – are now found from the bodies of fish we eat to the deepest part of the ocean – the Mariana Trench. Plastic, which takes hundreds of years to break down, if it breaks down at all, can destroy ocean habitats and ocean life.

The solution to the plastics problem in the ocean will take action from governments and companies – the entities that can change the system. We can’t recycle our way out of this problem. We can increase the use of river barriers that capture plastic and other trash, but the most impactful solution would be a moratorium on single-use plastic. Do you want the companies that produce plastic to survive in their current form, or do you want the ocean to survive? Because that is the choice.

So we are killing the ocean – why should I care?

We are headed to a world in which our oceans are essentially deserts. Yes, oceans are quite wet, but by mid-century – like deserts – if we don’t take action they may be largely barren landscapes hostile to plant and animal life. Do a little internet searching down the “Will the oceans be dead by mid-century?” rabbit hole and you will find extreme views on both sides. But that this is even a question is terrifying.

If we continue on our current path, the oceans will continue to lose the ability to support life. The warming of the ocean, ocean acidification, plastic pollution, overfishing, ocean deoxygenation, and chemical runoff and waste dumped into the ocean will all grow as problems in the coming years if we don’t take action. All of life in the ocean may not die off, but most of it will. This is an experiment we don’t want to run. If we continue with business as usual, we will have less life in the ocean, fewer fish, fewer jobs, and less oxygen. None of those things are desirable.

Mass die-offs in the ocean have happened before on Earth. The recovery of the oceans does happen but on something vastly beyond a human timescale. If we “nearly” kill off most things in the ocean by midcentury, it will take thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years for the ocean to recover. You, and maybe even humanity won’t be around to see it.

If we continue on the path we are on today, we should develop a taste for jellyfish, as jellyfish are the form of life in the ocean that will thrive in the hothouse ocean we are creating. Jellyfish tolerate higher temperatures and will face fewer predators if the large fish, crabs, and sea turtles all die off, or mostly die off. Start writing that jellyfish cookbook, it is destined to be a best-seller.

(Sea-food menu of the future).

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