Ocean Acidification

About this book

The ocean helps moderate climate change thanks to its considerable capacity to store CO₂, through the combined actions of ocean physics, chemistry, and biology. This storage capacity limits the amount of human-released CO₂ remaining in the atmosphere. As CO₂ reacts with seawater, it generates dramatic changes in carbonate chemistry, including decreases in pH and carbonate ions and an increase in bicarbonate ions. The consequences of this overall process, known as "ocean acidification", are raising concerns for the biological, ecological, and biogeochemical health of the world's oceans, as well as for the potential societal implications. This research-level text is the first to synthesize the very latest understanding of the consequences of ocean acidification, with the intention of informing both future research agendas and marine management policy. A prestigious list of authors has been assembled, among them the coordinators of major national and international projects on ocean acidification.

Contents

Preface / Wallace S. Broecker

1. Ocean Acidification: Background and History / Jean-Pierre Gattuso and Lina Hansson
2. Past Changes of Ocean Carbonate Chemistry / Richard E. Zeebe and Andy Ridgwell
3. Recent and Future Changes in Ocean Carbonate Chemistry / James C. Orr
4. Skeletons and Ocean Chemistry: The Long View / Andrew H. Knoll and Woodward W. Fischer
5. Effect of Ocean Acidification on the Diversity and Activity of Heterotrophic Marine Microorganisms / Markus G. Weinbauer, Xavier Mari, and Jean-Pierre Gattuso
6. Effects of Ocean Acidification on Pelagic Organisms and Ecosystems / Ulf Riebesell and Philippe D. Tortell
7. Effects of Ocean Acidification on Benthic Processes, Organisms, and Ecosystems / Andreas J. Andersson, Fred T. Mackenzie, and Jean-Pierre Gattuso
8. Effects of Ocean Acidification on Nektonic Organisms / Hans-Otto Pörtner, Magda Gutowska, Atsushi Ishimatsu, Magnus Lucassen, Frank Melzner, and Brad Seibel
9. Effects of Ocean Acidification on Sediment Fauna / Stephen Widdicombe, John I. Spicer, and Vassilis Kitidis
10. Effects of Ocean Acidification on Marine Biodiversity and Ecosystem Function / James P. Barry, Stephen Widdicombe, and Jason M. Hall-Spencer
11. Effects of Ocean Acidification on the Marine Source of Atmospherically-Active Trace Gases / Frances Hopkins, Philip Nightingale, and Peter Liss
12. Biogeochemical Consequences of Ocean Acidification and Feedback to the Earth System / Marion Gehlen, Nicolas Gruber, Reidun Gangstø, Laurent Bopp, and Andreas Oschlies
13. The Ocean Acidification Challenges Facing Science and Society / Carol Turley and Kelvin Boot
14. Impact of Climate Change Mitigation on Ocean Acidification Projections / Fortunat Joos, Thomas L. Frölicher, Marco Steinacher, and Gian-Kasper Plattner
15. Ocean Acidification: Knowns, Unknowns, and Perspectives / Jean-Pierre Gattuso, Jelle Bijma, Marion Gehlen, Ulf Riebesell, and Carol Turley

Index

Customer Reviews

Biography

Jean-Pierre Gattuso is CNRS Research Professor at the Laboratoire d'Océanographie de Villefranche, CNRS and Université Pierre et Marie Curie-Paris 6. His main research activity relates to the cycling of carbon and carbonate in coastal ecosystems. More recently, he focused on the response of marine organisms and ecosystems to ocean acidification and published his first paper on this topic in 1998. He is the Scientific Coordinator of the FP7 large-scale integrated project EPOCA (European Project on Ocean Acidification). Jean-Pierre Gattuso is co-editor of the Guide to Best Practices in Ocean Acidification Research and Data Reporting published by the European Publications Office in 2010. He is also the Founding President of the Biogeosciences Division of the European Geosciences Union (2001-2005) and the Founding editor-in-chief of the journal Biogeosciences (2004-2009).

Lina Hansson has a Master of Science in Biotechnology Engineering and is the project manager of EPOCA - the European Project on Ocean Acidification. She co-edited the Guide to Best Practices in Ocean Acidification Research and Data Reporting, a guidance document for the ocean acidification research community covering seawater carbonate chemistry, experimental design of perturbation experiments, measurements of CO₂-sensitive processes and data reporting and usage. Lina Hansson is the co-author of several articles on the EPOCA project in the newsletters of IMBER, SOLAS, LOICZ and The Eggs and in a special issue of Oceanography magazine on ocean acidification published in 2009.


Contributors:
- Andreas J. Andersson - Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences, USA
- James P. Barry - Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, USA
- Jelle Bijma - Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, Germany
- Kelvin Boot - Plymouth Marine Laboratory, UK
- Laurent Bopp - Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l'Environnement, France
- Wallace S. Broecker - Columbia University, USA
- Woodward W. Fischer - California Institute of Technology, USA
- Thomas L. Frölicher - University of Bern, Switzerland and Princeton University, USA
- Reidun Gangstø - Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology MeteoSwiss, Switzerland
- Jean-Pierre Gattuso - INSU-CNRS and UPMC Univ Paris 06, France
- Marion Gehlen - Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l'Environnement, France
- Nicolas Gruber - ETH Zürich, Switzerland
- Magda Gutowska - Kiel University, Germany
- Jason M. Hall-Spencer - University of Plymouth, UK
- Lina Hansson - Project Manager EPOCA
- Frances Hopkins - Plymouth Marine Laboratory, UK
- Atsushi Ishimatsu - Nagasaki University, Japan
- Fortunat Joos - University of Bern, Switzerland
- Vassilis Kitidis - Plymouth Marine Laboratory, UK
- Andrew H. Knoll - Harvard University, USA
- Peter Liss - University of East Anglia, UK
- Magnus Lucassen - Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, Germany
- Fred T. Mackenzie - University of Hawaii, USA
- Xavier Mari - Université Montpellier II, France and Institute of Biotechnology, Environmental Biotechnology Laboratory, Vietnam
- Frank Melzner - Leibniz Institute of Marine Science, Germany
- Philip Nightingale - Plymouth Marine Laboratory, UK
- James C. Orr - Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l'Environnement, France
- Andreas Oschlies - Leibniz Institute of Marine Science, Germany
- Gian-Kasper Plattner - University of Bern, Switzerland
- Hans-Otto Pörtner - Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, Germany
- Andy Ridgwell - University of Bristol, UK
- Ulf Riebesell - Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences, Germany
- Brad Seibel - University of Rhode Island, USA
- John I. Spicer - University of Plymouth, UK
- Marco Steinacher - University of Bern, Switzerland
- Philippe D. Tortell - University of British Columbia, Canada
- Carol Turley - Plymouth Marine Laboratory, UK
- Markus G. Weinbauer - INSU-CNRS and UPMC Univ Paris 06, France
- Stephen Widdicombe - Plymouth Marine Laboratory, UK
- Richard E. Zeebe - University of Hawaii, USA