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Acidification in the Arctic Ocean

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

butthurt writes:

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:

• The Canadian Press via the Toronto Star
• The Canadian Press via the Chronicle Herald (identical to story in Toronto Star)
• Eurekalert
• University of Delaware UDaily
• Tech Times

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Original Submission

• Re:2010? (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.

  Parent

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