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posted by martyb on Monday April 03 2017, @02:19PM   Printer-friendly
from the chilling-news dept.

NOAA, The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, reports [*] on the discovery, published in Nature Climate Change (full article is pay-walled):

[...] that between the 1990s and 2010, acidified waters expanded northward approximately 300 nautical miles from the Chukchi Sea slope off the coast of northwestern Alaska to just below the North Pole. Also, the depth of acidified waters increased from approximately 325 feet below the surface to more than 800 feet.

The United Nations Development Programme explains that

[...] since gases such as CO2 dissolve more readily in colder water, ocean acidification will progress – already is progressing – much more rapidly in the Arctic and Antarctic, where a number of species are already facing challenges in fixing their shells. Under a lower pH ocean future, increasing numbers of calcium carbonate fixing organisms could face dramatic losses or even extinction.

[*] (archive link 1, archive link 2)

Additional coverage:


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 03 2017, @03:53PM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 03 2017, @03:53PM (#488240)

    between the 1990s and 2010

    Why does the data stop in 2010? This makes it seem like they are only reporting on 2/3 the data.

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  • (Score: 2) by frojack on Monday April 03 2017, @04:36PM (1 child)

    by frojack (1554) on Monday April 03 2017, @04:36PM (#488255) Journal

    Probably more recent data is still paywalled....

    --
    No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
    • (Score: 0, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 03 2017, @05:03PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 03 2017, @05:03PM (#488267)

      Looks like they are melding together multiple datasets in some byzantine way (but it is impossible that any errors from this can affect their conclusions):

      CHINARE 2008 and 2010, we included Arctic Ocean Section 1994 (AOS 1994),
      Surface Heat Budget of the Arctic Ocean 1998 (SHEBA1998), and Beringia 2005
      (ODEN 2005) historical data (Supplementary Fig. 3). Certified Reference Materials
      (CRM) were used in all analyses with the exception of the AOS1994 cruise, during
      which CRM was not yet available. AOS 1994 data were quality controlled and
      adjusted by the community (reduced by �24 �mol kg􀀀1).
      [...]
      To correct the di�erences between the five trans-western Arctic Ocean cruises
      we determined `relatively reasonable' DIC and TA values of the deep waters and
      then used them to correct the small systematic di�erences among the five cruises.
      This method is consistent with that of ref. 36. This correction and consistency
      check allows us to use all existing data from a total of 14 cruises (Supplementary
      Table 2; note most of them are limited to a subregion and some of them have data
      quality issues that we chose not to include in Fig. 1 in this paper). First, DIC and
      TA values of the deep water were normalized to a salinity of 35 (NDIC and NTA,
      NDICDDIC/Salinity�35 and NTADTA/Salinity�35, respectively). Second, we
      divided the Canadian Basin into three distinct subregions (Supplementary
      Table 2)�the southern Canada Basin (SCB), northern Canada Basin (NCB), and
      Makarov Basin (MB)�to evaluate spatial variation due to inconsistent sampling
      density. Then we averaged the NDIC and NTA values in each subregion for every
      cruise to decrease the sensitivity of di�erent sample size among cruises
      (Supplementary Table 2). The next step was to further average NDIC and NTA for
      all of the cruises for every subregion to evaluate if there were significant di�erences
      among them. Finally, we averaged the values of the three subregions to create
      `relatively reasonable' values of NDIC (2,157 �mol kg􀀀1) and NTA
      (2,307 �mol kg􀀀1) for the whole Canadian Basin. Subsequently, for all the cruises,
      the water column DIC and TA data were adjusted to the above NDIC and NTA
      using equations (1) and (2)
      [...]
      After the correction described above, TA and DIC data from the five
      trans-western Arctic Ocean cruises below 400m agreed well (Supplementary
      Fig. 1). Any slight errors associated with the correction of these deep-water values
      do not a�ect our conclusion.

      That still doesn't explain why there was no more recent data available.

  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by BananaPhone on Monday April 03 2017, @05:20PM

    by BananaPhone (2488) on Monday April 03 2017, @05:20PM (#488273)

    Probably not collected.
    Remember, those were the years when King Harper ruled Canada.
    Anything that had to do with the environment or global warming was cut and shredded.

    And now, it's the US' turn.

  • (Score: 2) by butthurt on Wednesday April 05 2017, @03:15AM

    by butthurt (6141) on Wednesday April 05 2017, @03:15AM (#488989) Journal

    From the Eurekalert article:

    The researchers studied water samples taken during cruises by Chinese ice breaker XueLong (meaning "snow dragon") in summer 2008 and 2010 from the upper ocean of the Arctic's marginal seas to the basins as far north as 88 degrees latitude, just below the North Pole, as well as data from three other cruises.