Wei-Jun Cai, an expert in marine chemistry at the University of Delaware, is sounding new alarm bells about the changing chemistry of the western region of the Arctic Ocean, where he and an international team of collaborators have found acidity levels increasing three to four times faster than ocean waters elsewhere.
Wei-Jun Cai, an expert in marine chemistry at the University of Delaware, is sounding new alarm bells about the changing chemistry of the western region of the Arctic Ocean, where he and an international team of collaborators have found acidity levels increasing three to four times faster than ocean waters elsewhere.
They also identified a strong correlation between the accelerated rate of melting ice in the region and the rate of ocean acidification, a perilous combination that threatens the survival of plants, shellfish, coral reefs and other marine life and biological processes throughout the planet’s ecosystem.
The new study, published on Thursday, Sept. 30 in Science, the flagship journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, is the first analysis of Arctic acidification that includes data from more than two decades, spanning the period from 1994 to 2020.
Read More: University of Delaware
Researchers, including the University of Delaware's Zhangxian Ouyang, traveled aboard the icebreaker R/V Xue Long into an active melting zone in the Arctic Ocean to get samples for analysis. (Photo Credit: Zhangxian Ouyang, Wei-Jun Cai and Liza Wright-Fairbanks/ University of Delaware)
