- The world's oceans are sacrificing themselves to try
to stave off global warming, a major international research programme has
discovered.
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- Their waters have absorbed about half of the carbon dioxide
emitted by human activities over the past two centuries, the 15-year study
has found. Without this moderating effect, climate change would have been
much more rapid and severe.
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- But in the process the seas have become more acid, threatening
their very life. The research warns that this could kill off their coral
reefs, shellfish and plankton, on which all marine life depends.
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- News of the alarming conclusions of the research - headed
by US government scientists - follows the discovery, reported in Friday's
Independent, of a catastrophic failure of North Sea birds to breed this
summer, thought to be the result of global warming.
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- The disaster - forecast in The Independent on Sunday
last October - appears to have been caused by plankton moving hundreds
of miles to the north to escape from an unprecedented warming on the sea's
waters. Sand eels - millions of which normally provide the staple diet
of many seabirds and large fish - have disappeared, because they, in turn,
depend on the plankton.
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- The new study warns of an even more alarming collapse
throughout the world's oceans if climate change continues. It is the result
of a mammoth research effort, which has taken and analysed 72,000 samples
of seawater from 10,000 different places in the oceans since 1989.
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- Led by scientists working for the US National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration in Seattle, it has also involved teams of
researchers from Australia, Canada, Spain, Japan, South Korea and Germany.
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- It has discovered, for the first time, that the seas
and oceans have soaked up almost half of all human emissions of carbon
dioxide, the main cause of global warming, since the start of the Industrial
Revolution.
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- By doing so they have greatly slowed climate change,
and almost certainly prevented it from already causing catastrophe.
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- "The oceans are performing this tremendous service
to humankind by reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,"
says Dr Christopher Sabine, one of the leaders of the research. But, he
adds, this is coming at a great cost because the act of salvage "is
changing the chemistry of the oceans".
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- The research concludes that "dramatic changes",
such as have not occurred for at least 20 million years, now appear to
be under way. They could have "significant impacts on the biological
systems of the oceans in ways that we are only beginning to understand".
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- As the water naturally absorbs carbon dioxide from the
air, it forms carbonic acid. And the acid then mops up calcium carbonate,
a substance normally plentiful in the oceans that sea creatures use to
make the protective shells that they need to survive.
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- The scientists say that if the world goes on producing
more and more carbon dioxide, this shell formation will become increasingly
difficult, while the world will heat up anyway.
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- The results are incalculable, because so may shelled
creatures live in the seas, ranging from clams and corals to the plankton
and other tiny creatures that form the base of the entire food chain of
the oceans.
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- The surface waters and upper 10 per cent of the oceans
- which contain most of the life - are the most acidic, the research shows.
The acidity also varies around the world. The North Atlantic - the nearest
ocean to the world's most polluting countries, is the most affected; the
southern ocean that encircles Antarctica the least.
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- When the scientists took a species of snail from the
relatively unpolluted waters of the far north of the Pacific, near the
Arctic Circle, and put it in seawater with carbon dioxide levels similar
to those found elsewhere, the animals' shells began to dissolve.
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- Dr Peter Brewer, of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research
Institute - who was not himself involved in the research - calls the results
"a wake-up call". He adds: "The numbers are crystal clear.
The analysis is impeccable. There is no uncertainty about this. These impacts
of a high carbon dioxide ocean are real, and are measurable today."
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- The research also explodes a heavily touted "solution"
to global warming. Critics of international action, including members of
the Bush administration, say that there is little need to curb carbon dioxide
emissions because the gas could be collected and injected into the oceans
for disposal. However, the study shows that this cure could be even worse
than the disease.
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- A Sea Song
- By Martin Newell
- 'IoS' Poet in Residence
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- The sand eel goes without his tea
- Because of human industry
- So guillemots are starving
- And the puffin's eating nothing
- The kittiwake and skua
- May not grow to be mature
- And the sea's got indigestion now
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- Chorus
- Must I go down to the sea again?
- To the lonely sea in tears
- The sky is strangely empty
- And the silence hurts my ears
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- Now the arctic tern - the mother
- Thinks a tern deserves another
- But she ain't disposed to breeding
- With her troubles over feeding
- The ocean still is heaving
- But the creatures are all leaving
- And the sea's got indigestion now
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- See, there isn't any potion
- You can give a gippy ocean
- Like a Gaviston or Rennie
- And we ain't come up with any
- Since the businesses we banked on
- Have been murdering the plankton
- So the sea's got indigestion now
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- The day before the siren went
- We thought about environment
- We talked about restrictions
- And made various predictions
- But market forces beckoned
- So the oceans all came second
- And the sea's got indigestion now.
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- © 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
- http://news.independent.co.uk/world/environment/story.jsp?story=546761
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