Lab puts Puget Sound sea life to an acid test

Excerpts from article by Craig Welch, Seattle Times environment reporter, published April 11, 2011 …

Scientists last summer determined Puget Sound holds some of the most corrosive seawater found on Earth.

Biologists at the Northwest Fisheries Science Center are doing some of the most sophisticated work anywhere to see how the marine world responds to a major side effect of fossil-fuel emissions: increasingly corrosive seas.

Because Puget Sound sea life is used to a more corrosive environment, are its creatures more likely to adapt?

Or do those creatures already live so close to survival’s edge that the consequences of ocean acidification will strike here first — and hardest?

“The ocean-chemistry changes we’re seeing are happening faster than we’ve ever seen in history,” said Paul McElhany, a research ecologist with the National Marine Fisheries Service in Seattle. “They can really alter the ecology of the ocean and lead to fundamental shifts in the structure of the marine food web.”

The pH of oceans measures a slightly alkaline 8.1 on the scale between acid and base, but scientists for years have predicted the emissions that fuel climate change would make waters more acidic as CO2 is absorbed by the ocean. In 2008, oceanographers discovered that was happening decades faster than expected, with waters off the West Coast and Puget Sound registering as low as 7.7. Some waters in Hood Canal hit 7.4.

More at Seattle Times original article:

Lab puts Puget Sound sea life to an acid test