Marine Industries at Risk on Both Coasts as Oceans Acidify - The Washington Post

Scientists testing the water up and down the Pacific Coast found evidence of a steep decline in pH.  Studies have found that more acidic water in Alaska is stunting the growth of red king crabs and tanner crabs.  Plummeting pH levels across the Eastern Seaboard have been impacting the shellfish industry for decades.

The economic impacts of rising acidity can be devastating.  At its peak in 1952, U.S. producers harvested 72 million pounds of eastern oysters, according to data collected by the National Marine Fisheries Service.  In 2012, the last year for which data is available, farmers hauled in just 23.8 million pounds.  Producers haven’t harvested more than 30 million pounds since 1996.

In a new study published online in the scholarly journal Progress in Oceanography, a team of scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found rural areas in southern Alaska are at high risk of losing hundreds of millions of dollars in commercial and subsistence fishing stocks.  Declining seafood harvests will impact about 20 percent of Alaska’s population, which relies on subsistence fishing for significant amounts of their diet, the NOAA report found.

Because it takes so long for water to move from surface to bottom to surface, acidification is a kind of window into the past — and a preview of the future.  The upwelling happening on the West Coast today is water that last mixed with the atmosphere in the 1950s or 1960s, when far less carbon was being spewed into the atmosphere.  In 50 to 100 years, when water mixing with today’s atmosphere upwells, the water will be even more corrosive.

Marine Industries at Risk on Both Coasts as Oceans Acidify - The Washington Post