Though I couldn't pony-up for the steep registration fees for the AAAS annual conference last week here in San Francisco, I was keeping an eye open for ocean related news items that usually swirl around the meeting. I was particularly interested in papers focused on the implications of increased ocean acidification on marine life. One presentation last week, Ocean Acidification Bad for Shells and Reefs published in the current issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research, reported on data collected from ocean sampling in the Pacific Ocean from the southern to northern hemispheres confirming that the oceans are becoming more acidic.
The implications being, in part, that increasingly acidic oceans could wreak havoc on marine organisms that build their shells and skeletons from calcium carbonate (such as the planktonic pteropod mollusk pictured above). Since these creatures provide essential food and habitat for other ocean dwellers, the effects could ripple disastrously throughout the ocean.
Read the Science Daily synopsis The Rising Tide of Acid and also note that the author, an editor for Science magazine, quotes the old urban legend that soda (a mildly acidic solution saturated with CO2) can dissolve a tooth. Guess he didn't catch the MythBusters debunk that old chestnut last year. Stain a tooth? Yes. Dissolve a tooth? Nope.
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