Champagne Seas—Foretelling the Ocean’s Future?

Abstract

Imagine you are an ocean researcher and you want to study the ecological impacts of ocean acidification. You know from studies carried out under controlled laboratory conditions that lowered pH can impact the physiology, growth, and development of certain organisms. What you want to know next is how these changes in individual species translate into the direct and indirect ecological changes that occur in the open ocean. Here we summarize the results from a new approach to understanding the ecological implications of ocean acidification: observational studies and IN SITU experimentation at ocean sites with low pH and high CO2.