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What the @#&pH is Going On?

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Ocean acidity may conjure up a scene from the Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy throws a bucket of water towards the burning scarecrow and accidently hits the witch, “I’m melting, I’m melting.”  But ocean acidity is much more subtle than that.  A recent article in the Washington Post on-line headline “Ocean Acidification Emerges as New Climate Threat”, Juliet Eiperin from the post talks with Kris Holderied, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Kasitsna Bay Laboratory, Alaska about the issue.

NOAA’s major concern is with the threat to U.S. fisheries in the region (The North West and Alaska) due to “human-generated carbon emissions” making the ocean’s waters more acidic.  According to article, the oceans absorb about 30% of the carbon dioxide we put in the air.  Presently, the sea is 30% more acidic that before the industrial revolution, and it is predicted that at the current rate of global carbon emissions, the oceans acidity could “double by 2100.”  In other words, pH levels are dropping.  The falling pH levels could affect the nervous systems of some species of fish making them more vulnerable to predation, and inhibit the growth of reefs, important nurseries.  Some areas are more vulnerable than others.  For instance, along the Pacific shelf, deeper water comes up and spills over the shelf.  Increasing acidity levels in this water.  That increased acidity is killing oyster larvae farmers are growing.  Oyster farmers off the coasts of Washington and Oregon recognized this potential issue early and were able to institute projects to to time their intakes of water to reduce the results from this upwelling.   As a result, and if we look at the cost-benefit for this project, “a $500,000 investment in pH monitoring equipment, saved the oyster industry $34 million in one year (2011).”  That’s a ratio we can certainly live with.

The domino effect of these issues is sometimes not so obvious.  But in this case, the spat (the term for the oyster larvae) are used by oyster farmers as far away as Homer, Alaska.  A loss of those spats has industry wide ramification. 

Another project spawned (excuse the pun) from the research is the placing of 4 pH monitoring buoys throughout the state of Alaska to study the pH along the Alaskan shoreline.  However, it is a fair-and-balanced study.  Scientists are also studying the effect of lower pH on surf smelt, a species particularly suited to thrive in lower pH environment, and the Dungeness crab that does not do well in low pH.  The Commonwealth of Virginia has funded a project for six shellfish hatcheries to monitor the water chemistry of the Chesapeake Bay to study the effects of fertilizer runoff, another potential for contributing to water acidity.

But we think that this statement brings it home, not only to business, but to the microcosm of business we call project management:  “When you ask why does ocean acidification matters, often we’re interested because of the fish we eat and the things we make money off of,” said Shallin Busch, a research ecologist at the NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle, Washington.


Posted by Dave Shirley on: October 08, 2012 08:50 PM | Permalink

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