“But these ideas miss the point. They will still allow carbon dioxide emissions to continue to increase — and thus the oceans to become more and more acidic. There is only one way to stop the devastation the oceans are now facing and that is to limit carbon-dioxide emissions as a matter of urgency,” he said.
This was backed by other speakers at the conference. Daniel Conley, of Lund University, Sweden, said that increasing acidity levels, sea level rises and temperature changes now threatened to bring about irreversible loss of biodiversity in the sea.
Christoph Heinze, of Bergen University, Norway, said his studies, part of the EU CarboOcean project, had found that carbon from the atmosphere was being transported into the oceans’ deeper waters far more rapidly than expected and was already having a corrosive effect on life forms there.
The oceans’ vulnerability to climate change and rising carbon-dioxide levels has also been a key factor in the launching of the EU’s Tara Ocean project. The expedition, on the sailing ship Tara, will take three years to circumnavigate the globe, culminating in a voyage through the icy Northwest Passage in Canada, and will make continual and detailed samplings of seawater to study its life forms.
A liter of seawater contains between 1 billion and 10 billion single-celled organisms called prokaryotes, between 10 billion and 100 billion viruses and a vast number of more complex, microscopic creatures known as zooplankton, said Chris Bowler, a marine biologist on Tara.
“People think they are just swimming in water when they go for a dip in the sea,” he said. “In fact, they are bathing in a plankton soup.”
That plankton soup is of crucial importance to the planet, he said.
“As much carbon dioxide is absorbed by plankton as is absorbed by tropical rainforests. Its health is therefore of crucial importance to us all,” he said.
However, only 1 percent of the life forms found in the sea have been properly identified and studied, Bowler said.
“The aim of the Tara project is to correct some of that ignorance and identify many more of these organisms while we still have the chance. Issues like ocean acidification, rising sea levels and global warming will not be concerns at the back of our minds. They will be a key focus for the work that we do while we are on our expedition,” he said.
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