Fossil Fuel and the State of the Ocean

Reader Contribution by Richard Hilderman and Ph.D.
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Earlier this year the International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO) convened a workshop of marine scientists to consider the impact of multiple stressors such as warming, acidification and overfishing of the ocean. The scientists concluded that a mass extinction of ocean species will occur if the damage to the ecosystem continues to escalate!  Two of the findings which we will discuss were:

1. The ocean is currently absorbing more carbon from the atmosphere than at the time of the last mass extinction millions of years ago.

2. A single mass coral bleaching event in 1998 killed 16 percent of the world’s tropical coral reefs.

In this posting we will discuss how the burning of fossil fuel is changing the “State of the Ocean.” Our burning of fossil fuel has created an overload of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (my posting entitled “Fossil Fuel and Atmospheric Levels of Carbon Dioxide”). The ocean is becoming more acidic because atmospheric carbon dioxide overload is dropping more carbon dioxide into the ocean (my posting entitled “Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Levels and Ocean Acidification”). 

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