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biffvernon wrote:I've said before on this forum that I think ocean acidification is our absolute biggest problem, the more so because nobody notices it till it's far too late.

This paper is very important:

http://plymouth.academia.edu/JasonHallS ... dification

UndercoverElephant wrote:Biggest problem? Bigger than climate change? Bigger than overpopulation?

It's a big problem, but not the biggest.

"Where are you going?" "0cean acidification." "Oh, the ocean people are the only ones here more depressed than climate scientists." #AAASmtg

Hönisch et al wrote:Ocean acidification may have severe consequences for marine ecosystems; however, assessing its future impact is difficult because laboratory experiments and field observations are limited by their reduced ecologic complexity and sample period, respectively. In contrast, the geological record contains long-term evidence for a variety of global environmental perturbations, including ocean acidification plus their associated biotic responses. We review events exhibiting evidence for elevated atmospheric CO2, global warming, and ocean acidification over the past ~300 million years of Earth’s history, some with contemporaneous extinction or evolutionary turnover among marine calcifiers. Although similarities exist, no past event perfectly parallels future projections in terms of disrupting the balance of ocean carbonate chemistry—a consequence of the unprecedented rapidity of CO2 release currently taking place.

biffvernon wrote:Yep, and the Hall-Spencer paper suggests that a large proportion of marine species are going to be in trouble this century.

The color of the ice is related the amount of air which remains trapped inside. As the ice is trapped in higher depths and is more compressed, the air escapes and the ices becomes more and more blue. Those icebergs seen by my colleague hadn't seen the light of the sun for a long time; perhaps centuries..