Acid Oceans

Description

If you're an ocean creature with a hard shell - like a sea urchin, a hermit crab, or a coral polyp - you prefer ocean water with a pH of about 8.2. This chemistry makes it easy to assemble your armor from carbon-based building blocks dissolved in the ocean. Since the beginning of the industrial age, though, the ocean has been absorbing the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide from the air. The increase in carbon dioxide has made the ocean's pH more acidic, dropping to 8.05 on average. Biologists like Gretchen Hofmann are realizing that this tiny change is hampering the development of hard-shelled marine creatures, leaving them more vulnerable to environmental stressors. This science bulletin joins Hofmann's team as they use a an acidic ocean environment in a lab at the University of California, Santa Barbara, to study how lower pH affects sea urchins.

Runtime

6 min

Subjects

Genre

Date of Publication

[2012], c2008

Database

Films on Demand

Direct Link