作者：Celad Evra | 来自：SiGMA Cube | 遵循Creative Commons“署名-非商业性使用-相同方式共享”协议3.0。

Ocean acidification below the surface

The climate change deniers say that climate change and relevant concerns are a fad. Well they must be wrong. From my personal experience I was reminded of the climate change scenario in 1980s — right, before I went out of the kindergarten — and that was like 20 years ago. And scientists today are using data that are accumulated continuously in the past 20 years to study the impact of climate change.

One instance is this preprint published on the PNAS website. The authors creatively used the fixed-temperature pH data, avoiding problems like the change of H₂CO₃ equilibria with temperature, and making the seasonal trend pronounced. It is pointed out that there is a trend of decreasing pH at sea surface, and more importantly, the seasonal pattern of water change between surface and sub-surface zones of the ocean may be a profound factor in a more complicated ocean acidification picture.

There are drivers at different scales at play here, causing diurnal, seasonal and annual variabilities of the ocean acidity. The authors mentioned a strong pH negative anomaly in 1998, which causes me to think whether there could be some cross-scale interactions, such as El Nino, also at play.

Another thought that occurred to me is that the dissolved organic carbon may be a slow variable in the ocean system. Of course I am not an oceanographer and this is just a wild guess. But if there is any oceanographer reading, would you care to explain the circulation of inorganic carbon in the ocean? We all know the acidity in the ocean is slowly increasing, but if there is an accumulation process of inorganic carbon that we do not know, one day it is going to give us a bigger surprise given adequate temperature and mixing conditions.

John E. Dore, Roger Lukas, Daniel W. Sadler, Matthew J. Church, & David M. Karl (2009). Physical and biogeochemical modulation of ocean acidification in the central North Pacific Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0906044106

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