Bad Acid Trip: How CO2 Could Kill the Oceans

This has been making the rounds, but it's worth repeating: Ocean acidity is rising much faster than even the gloomiest predictions by scientists.

In the Pacific Ocean, waters are corrosive enough to dissolve the shells of sea creatures. Right now.

That's many decades before expected.

The culprit? A record rise in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Carbon dioxide dissolves in seawater. It forms carbonic acid. As the oceans are forced to soak up more and more CO2, the ph drops and acidity soars.

The findings are thanks to researchers at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle.

Their shocking research, called "Evidence for Upwelling of Corrosive ‘Acidified’ Water onto the Continental Shelf," (sub req'd) was published in the journal Science last week.

Once experts sounded the alarm, they were plucked by members of Congress to bring the news to the political center stage.

Here's the reason for the urgency:

After examining data from 13 survey lines along Pacific routes in Canada to Northern Mexico in spring 2007, the researchers found corrosive water less than 20 miles off the West coast -- for the first time ever.

It was also the first time that acidic ocean water was found in large quantities along the continental shelf in western North America, the shallow waters where most of the sea creatures live.

It's part of a startling trend.

Since the Industrial Revolution, ocean acidity in the world has increased 30 percent.

Some scientists say ocean acidification is happening at a rate that has not been experienced for at least 400,000 years. Others claim for at last 20 million.

And still others were caught off guard by the latest news. Here's scientist Corinne Le Quéré of the University of East Anglia, in Norwich, England, responding in Science News:

I hadn't really thought we were already there.

Oh, we're there.

We're so there that entire marine ecosystems could be wiped out if CO2 levels continue to soar, unabated.

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