Underwater eruption, dead fish may give clues to climate change - CBS News
Over the crater, the water heated up by as much as 65 degrees Fahrenheit (18.8 degrees Celsius), the researchers found. Dissolved oxygen in the water all but disappeared, decreasing by 90 percent to 100 percent in places. Meanwhile, carbon and carbon dioxide values shot up, and the pH of the water went down by 2.8, meaning it became more acidic.
Fish died or disappeared in the wake of the underwater eruption, which also killed a massive amount of plankton in deep waters...Increase in temperature, decrease in oxygen and a more acidic pH is exactly what scientists would expect to be the result of global warming for the ocean, Fraile-Nuez said. As the oceans take up more and more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, scientists predict they'll respond much as the area around El Hierro has to the volcanic eruption -- though not necessarily on the same scale.
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2 comments:
The sad fact is that the education system's failure to teach analytical thinking skills results in stories like this being uncritically accepted.
Readers will happily consume crap because they don't know any better.
Any time anyone talks about the oceans becoming "more acidic" you know that either they are so ignorant they should not be even making a comment or are using deliberately dishonest propaganda.
There are two equally important flaws with "ocean acidification" as an argument.
The first is that the oceans all have a pH above 7, so they cannot acidify (although theyh can become basic). So talking of acidification is a lie, and a lie deliberately used to make it sound scary.
The second is that ocean pH varies quite a lot anyway, over rather short distances and over very short times. So the ocean ecosystem cannot be very sensitive to pH.
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