Ocean Acidification: Lessons from the open ocean to the coastal seas

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Wednesday, March 26th, 2014
7:00 PM to 8:00 PM

Ocean acidification (OA) is a very real consequence of anthropogenic CO2 emissions that has been well documented in open ocean settings. In coastal ocean areas, OA has been identified as a threat to ecosystems and the communities that they support, but the signal in available data is much harder to disentangle from natural sources of carbon variability. This is because coastal systems experience massive swings in chemical conditions owing to a number of unique physical and biological forcings that operate over a broad range of time scales. Our group at the Ocean Acidification Research Center and the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory have been working in North American coastal waters from California to the Arctic coast of Alaska, an area extremely vulnerable to human-induced acidification, to understand and track the manifestations of OA. In this talk, I will detail the problem of OA, and describe some of the progress we have made to track OA over a broad range of coastal settings: from the coast of California to coastal seas of Alaska.

Wiley Evans is a Research Associate at the NOAA Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle Washington, and at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Ocean Acidification Research Center in Fairbanks Alaska. He is also an Affiliate Researcher at the Vancouver Island University Centre for Shellfish Research. Wiley is lead author on a number of papers describing coastal carbon cycling in waters from Oregon to Alaska.