The Arctic Ocean, already besieged by shrinking ice caps due to climate change, now faces a shift in the fundamental chemistry of the water, as carbon-dioxide emissions are causing the pH levels in the ocean to become more acidic, a report from the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP) has found.
While it is unknown what this effect will have on Arctic Ocean life, the problem has several causes. As carbon-dioxide emissions are released into the atmosphere, the ocean's water absorbs some of the CO2, making the water more acidic. the warming of the Earth also has caused the summer sea ice to rapidly retreat, thus adding more surface area for the CO2 to be absorbed. With colder water already more able to absorb the emissions compounded by the surge in freshwater uptake from rivers and melted land ice distilling the saltwater means that it would take thousands upon thousands of years for the ocean to return to pre-industrial pH levels.
Richard Bellerby from the Norwegian Institute for Water Research and the study's chairman, had this to say about the findings to BBC News:
"Large rivers flow into the Arctic, which has an enormous catchment for its size...There's slow mixing so in effect we get a sort of freshwater lens on the top of the sea in some places, and freshwater lowers the concentration of ions that buffers pH change. The sea ice has been a lid on the Arctic, so the loss of ice is allowing fast uptake of CO2...Continued rapid change is a certainty."
The research team has been studying the seawater pH of the Iceland and Barents seas since the late 1960's. Since then the pH of the seawater has increase by 0.02 every decade, making the average acidity of the oceans about 30% higher than before the Industrial revolution. Studies were also held in the Bering Strait and the Canadian Basin.
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