Abstract
Rising atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) levels, from fossil fuel combustion and deforestation, along with agriculture and land-use practices are causing wholesale increases in seawater CO2 and inorganic carbon levels; reductions in pH; and alterations in acid-base chemistry of estuarine, coastal, and surface open-ocean waters. On the basis of laboratory experiments and field studies of naturally elevated CO2 marine environments, widespread biological impacts of human-driven ocean acidification have been posited, ranging from changes in organism physiology and population dynamics to altered communities and ecosystems. Acidification, in conjunction with other climate change–related environmental stresses, particularly under future climate change and further elevated atmospheric CO2 levels, potentially puts at risk many of the valuable ecosystem services that the ocean provides to society, such as fisheries, aquaculture, and shoreline protection. Thisreview emphasizes both current scientific understanding and knowledge gaps, highlighting directions for future research and recognizing the information needs of policymakers and stakeholders.
Highlights
Overall Patterns of Community ChangeStudies examining how individual organismal effects of ocean acidification will affect communities and functioning ecosystems have received increasing recent attention [20]
This review focuses on the rapidly expanding body of knowledge on ocean acidification in the scientific literature over the past decade since a previous Annual Reviews article on the topic [9]
In understanding the implications of the ongoing long-term, press perturbation of ocean acidification for marine species, ocean biological communities and ecosystems, and the risks to human communities that depend on marine resources and ecosystem services
Summary
Aqueous carbon dioxide [CO2(aq)] and the inorganic carbon system play a central role in seawater acid-base chemistry, and the addition of CO2 from natural and anthropogenic sources causes acidification and shifts in the speciation of dissolved ions [4, 22]. Many types of marine organisms that form shells and skeletons from calcium carbonate (CaCO3) minerals are sensitive to acidification. The solubility of carbonate minerals, CaCO3(s) ↔ CO23− + Ca2+, www.annualreviews.org Ocean Acidification Impacts 85 can be expressed as a carbonate saturation state, Calcite: a less soluble mineral form of calcium carbonate used by marine organisms in shell and skeleton formation via biomineralization. = [CO23−][Ca2+] , Ks p where Ksp is the apparent equilibrium solubility product at a given temperature, salinity, and pressure for each particular CaCO3 mineral form. Surface pH and CO23− are declining (Figure 1), and surface ocean pH is estimated to have dropped on average globally by approximately 0.1 units from the preindustrial era to present, which is an ∼30% increase in hydrogen ion concentration. Coastal systems tend to exhibit large amplitude variations of seawater chemistry on smaller time and space scales [34]
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