A healthy coral colony in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. A new study was the first ocean acidification experiment of a natural coral reef community.
A new report confirms coral reefs and acidic ocean water don’t mix.
At more than 1,400 miles long, the reef is the world’s largest coral reef and the planet’s biggest structure made by living organisms.
cidification will threaten sediments that are building blocks for reefs. Corals already face risks from ocean temperatures, pollution and overfishing.
Carbon dioxide, the main man-made greenhouse gas, forms a weak acid in water and threatens to dissolve the reef sediments, made from broken down bits of corals and other carbonate organisms that accumulate over thousands of years, it said.
“Our findings provide strong evidence that ocean acidification will severely slow coral reef growth in the future unless we make steep and rapid reductions in greenhouse gas emissions,” said study lead author Rebecca Albright of the California Academy of Sciences
Katharina Fabricius of the Australian Institute for Marine Science, who was not involved in the research, told the Atlantic that “we sort of knew that ocean acidification will affect reef growth. This experiment not only confirms that prediction, but informs us about the severity of the effect.
Most studies show that acidification will be overwhelmingly bad for ocean life, also threatening creatures such as oysters, lobsters and crabs. Another study on Thursday, however, found that it might help the growth of some plants.
“An increase of carbon dioxide in the ocean theoretically could stimulate higher growth of kelp and seaweeds,” Kasper Hancke, a biologist at the Norwegian Institute for Water Research, wrote in a statement.
Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution for Science, a co-author of the new study, said that “coral reefs offer economic opportunities to their surrounding communities from fishing and tourism. But for me, the reef is a beautiful and diverse outpouring of life that we are harming with our carbon dioxide emissions
