The Osprey: Ocean Acidification Global Warming’s Evil Twin

I like visiting the coast as much as anyone and try to visit as often as I am able despite the rather long four-hour drive from my home on the east side of Oregon’s Cascade Mountains.

While most people prefer to visit in the summer when the days are sunny and warm and the ocean fairly calm, I prefer to visit in the dead of winter when the Oregon coast is rainy and storm-battered. Storm watching is one of my favorite pastimes, sitting on a rock (or if the weather is really bad through my motel window) as great swells gather offshore and powerful waves crash against rocky headlands.

But below the unruly surface a storm of another sort is brewing, a sinister mix of climate and chemistry called ocean acidification whose effects scientists are just now beginning to understand.

---

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE

• OCEAN ACIDIFICATION

• GROWTH & SUSTAINABILITY

• ROGUE RIVER DAM REMOVAL

• GREAT LAKES WILD SALMON

• 2015 DROUGHT REPORT

---

This issue’s cover story, clearly told by Caren Braby, Marine Resources Program Manager for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, is a valuable primer on this looming threat to the world’s oceans.

As Braby relates, while climate change gets all the press, climate change’s evil twin, ocean acidification, is quietly doing its insidious damage. Particularly affecting ocean animals that use calcium carbonate to manufacture shells, the commercial oyster industry has been the first to suffer economically from ocean acidification, and oceanographers have been watching worriedly as coral beds around the world have declined and even died off from the same cause.

She points out that it is too soon to tell how ocean acidification may impact salmon and steelhead. I have a feeling we will find out soon enough.