Ocean offer warning on climate change
Posted: Thursday, April 23, 2009 12:24 PM
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On Assignment
By Ian Williams, NBC News correspondent
Will Howard used to think the biggest threat to the world's oceans came from the things you could see - like the detritus clogging so many our estuaries and coastal regions. Now he's found new evidence of how invisible changes in the chemistry of the water pose a disturbing new threat to life in the oceans.
"The impact has already begun. It's not a matter for laboratory experiments. It's happening now," he told me.
The world's oceans are becoming more acidic, as they absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and Howard has discovered the first direct field evidence of the impact on marine life - tell-tale changes in tiny sea snails the size of a grain of sand, which are struggling to make their shells.
"These organisms are the base of the marine food web, and what happens to them reverberates throughout the eco-system - right up to whales and penguins," says Howard, who's based at the Antarctic Climate & Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre at the University of Tasmania.
Click here to read more of Ian Williams reporting on the disturbing warning signs coming from the world's oceans and efforts to try to preserve a protected marine reserve, the Mariana Trench.
