The Last Time Oceans Got This Acidic This Fast, 96% of Marine Life Went Extinct

merbs writes: The biggest extinction event in planetary history was driven by the rapid acidification of our oceans, a new study concludes (abstract). So much carbon was released into the atmosphere, and the oceans absorbed so much of it so quickly, that marine life simply died off, from the bottom of the food chain up. That doesn't bode well for the present, given the similarly disturbing rate that our seas are acidifying right now. A team led by University of Edinburgh researchers collected rocks in the United Arab Emirates that were on the seafloor hundreds of millions of years ago, and used the boron isotopes found within to model the changing levels of acidification in our prehistoric oceans. They now believe that a series of gigantic volcanic eruptions in the Siberian Trap spewed a great fountain of carbon into the atmosphere over a period of tens of thousands of years. This was the first phase of the extinction event, in which terrestrial life began to die out.

Comments

Re:Strictly speaking...

[tompaulco]

Exactly. More fear mongering = more funding.

One must note that this is yet *another* shift in fearspeak. First it was global cooling. Then it was global warming. Then it was "climate change". Now it's acidification.

Ahh, but the "new ice age" scientists were not "peer reviewed", and in 20 or 30 years when they new disaster theory comes out, we will find out that global warming was not "super dipsoluscious peer reviewed".
I know that people are concerned, but the people crying doom has been going on probably since people learned how to write. So far as I can see the only difference between the crackpot on the corner with the cardboard sign and distinguished scientists is that it takes decades of research to determine that the scientists were crackpots.
I just can't see dropping everything I am doing and freaking out just because they are really quite certain that they are right this time. Sorry about being wrong those thousand times before. Really. Trust us.