This reduction equals the annual output of 150 million cars, or two-thirds of all US passenger vehicles. This is why, in the most ambitious step ever taken by the US to address climate change, President Obama has called for 1,000 US power plants to reduce emissions by 32 percent by 2030, as compared with 2005 levels. Dramatic change is apparent in the Antarctic, where the frigid waters can hold so much CO 2 that shelled creatures dissolve in the corrosive conditions, affecting food sources for fish, birds and marine mammals. Native fisheries in Patagonian waters may also be threatened. It is a concern in the Great Barrier Reef, where living corals have declined by half over the past three decades, reducing habitat for fish and the resilience of the entire reef system. Ocean acidification is weakening coral structures in the Caribbean and in cold-water reefs in waters off of Scotland and Norway. commercial fish catch and support more than 100,000 jobs. Also at risk are Alaska’s fisheries, which account for nearly 60 percent of U.S. shellfish industry to ocean acidification revealed a number of hotspots: the Pacific Northwest, Long Island Sound, Narragansett Bay, Chesapeake Bay, the Gulf of Mexico, and areas off Maine and Massachusetts. In 2015, the first nationwide study showing the vulnerability of the $1 billion U.S. But all three hitting our ocean at one time is a triple threat, with enormous implications for food security, local to global economies, jobs, and vital consumer goods and services. Along with increasingly acidified waters, the ocean is warming, and the oxygen critical to marine life is decreasing. How these fish may adapt to an eroding food supply is a critical question. Some of the two most vulnerable species are the small life forms that salmon and other commercially-important fish depend on for food. While much is still unknown about ocean acidification, science already shows that its consequences can be profound. Increasingly, corrosive waters are making it difficult for fragile marine life to build their protective shells and skeletons. This process is known as ocean acidification, and it’s literally causing a sea change that is threatening the fundamental chemical balance of ocean and coastal waters from pole to pole. The massive amount of carbon dioxide being absorbed by the ocean dissolves in seawater as carbonic acid. The consequences of disrupting what has been a relatively stable ocean environment for tens of millions of years are beginning to show.

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