Pertinent to my recent response to New Scientist on ocean acidification, Willis Eschenbach has a fascinating piece at Wattsupwiththat on a study of ocean pH along a transect from Hawaii to Alaska. Turns out that the further north you go, the less alkaline the ocean:
As one goes from Hawaii to Alaska the pH slowly decreases along the transect, dropping from 8.05 all the way down to 7.65. This is a change in pH of almost half a unit.
The study also measured the change caused by carbon dioxide from industry:
The maximum anthropogenic change [at the surface] over the entire transect was -0.03 pH in fifteen years. The average anthropogenic change over the top 150 metre depth was -0.023. From there down to 800 metres the average anthropogenic change was -0.011 in fifteen years.
In other words,
That means that at the current rate of change, the surface water in Hawaii will be as alkaline as the current Alaskan surface water in … well … um … lessee, divide by eleventeen, carry the quadratic resdual … I get a figure of 566 years. But of course, that is assuming that there would not be any mixing of the water during that half-millennium.
Eschenbach coincidentally uses much the same words as I did about ocean acidification:
My conclusion? To mis-quote Mark Twain, "The reports of the ocean's death have been greatly exaggerated."
One of Eschenbach's readers then points out (don't you love the way information can meet on the web?) that the pH of the water entering the Monterey Bay aquarium has been measured for many years and:
the sea creatures in the Monterey Bay can easily withstand a change in pH of 0.5 in the course of a single month.
