The waters off California are acidifying twice as rapidly as elsewhere on Earth, study finds.
As oceans become more acidic, sea creatures struggle to build up hardier shells, Osborne said, which allowed her and her colleagues to study the thickness of foraminifera shells and trace levels of ocean acidity back through time. They found that the organisms' shells were thinning as oceans became more acidic.
By zeroing in on specific signatures of carbon, the researchers were able to separate out natural climate variations that also cause chemical fluctuations along the West Coast, such as El Niño and La Niña cycles. Previous studies have shown that oceans have experienced a decline of 0.1 in pH since the Industrial Revolution in 1750. The pH scale ranges from 0 to 14, and lower values are more acidic, while higher values are more basic.
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