"As we watch the sun go down, evening after evening, through the smog across the poisoned waters of our native earth, we must ask our selves seriously whether we really wish some future universal historian on another planet to say about us " With al...
"Pollution should never be the price of prosperity."
-Al Gore
Despite receiving innumerable benefits from nature, humankind, as always, has decided to reject Nature's hospitality, inevitably forcing dire consequences unto us. We have always exploited nature, not bothering about the ill-effects it has caused to other living creatures of this planet to fulfil our own selfish needs. Of the numerous ones available, the most common example being releasing destructive gases into the environment in an unrestrained manner, which shoves both the terrestrial and marine life into further danger. Among many other gases, carbon dioxide plays a major role in ocean acidification, thus tampering marine life.
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The ocean has absorbed about 29% of global carbon dioxide emissions since the end of the preindustrial era. In the last decade (from 2008-2017), we've dumped into the atmosphere about 40 gigatons of emissions of heat-trapping gases each year from the burning of fossil fuels and land-use change—or the equivalent to 252 million blue whales. Carbon pollution is thus slowing the ocean's chemistry, slowing its ability to uptake CO2, making it more acidic, and harming marine life we depend on. Coastal and marine ecosystems are under tremendous stress from climate change. Ocean acidification, paired up with other climate impacts like an increase in water temperatures, deoxygenation, melting of ice, and coastal erosion, pose real threats to the survival of many marine species.
Ocean acidification is particularly detrimental to species that build their skeletons and shells from calcium carbonate (like clams, mussels, crabs, phytoplankton, and corals), and that constitutes the bottom of the food chain. Acidification reduces the availability of carbonate ions in ocean water, which provide the building blocks these organisms need to make their shells and skeletons, significantly reducing the chances for their offspring to survive.
In the presence of other climate stressors, ocean acidification makes it harder for species to bounce back. Taking the problem of coral bleaching as an example, corals maintain a mutualistic relationship with photosynthetic algae living in their tissue: corals provide shelter for the algae and each provides the other with nutrients necessary for their survival. But when water temperatures get too high, corals expel these algae, leaving them more vulnerable to disease and less able to maintain and build their skeletal structure.
Ocean acidification hinders the ability of corals to recover from these bleaching events because it reduces the amount of calcium carbonate available that corals need to grow back to health. A report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change finds that 99% of the world's warm-water coral reefs could disappear if global average temperatures rise 2°C or more above pre-industrial levels.
We must reduce carbon pollution to reduce ocean acidification, or leave the marine biodiversity at the hands of a cruel fate. The most effective way to limit ocean acidification is to act on climate change, implementing solutions to dramatically reduce the use of fossil fuels. If we adequately cut our global warming emissions, and we limit future warming, we can significantly reduce the harm to marine ecosystems.
