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>> Narrator: At San Francisco State's Romberg Tiburon Center
for Environmental Studies, scientists are finding
out how a one-cell marine organism will adapt
to growing ocean acidification.
They're focusing on a microscopic phytoplankton
that is a power player in the ocean's ability
to absorb greenhouse gases.
>> Jonathan Stillman: What these phytoplankton do, which is very interesting,
is they photosynthesize.
They take the energy from the sun
and they take carbon dioxide that's dissolved in the water
and make sugars and they make inorganic carbon.
The inorganic carbon shells form ballast.
They essentially help to sink the organic carbon
and they provide a mass by which
that organic carbon gets transported down.
>> Edward Carpenter: It's been estimated that this organism probably is involved
with about 85% of the transfer of carbon
from the surface waters,
those greenhouse gases down into deep water.
If it wasn't for phytoplankton doing this in organisms
like Emiliania Huxleyi, we would basically be cooked.
>> Tomoko Komada: Ocean acidification is a consequence
of increased atmospheric C02 levels, which is caused
by continued burning of fossil fuels by human activity.
So once carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere, it'll dissolve
into the surface oceans.
And when it does, it produces carbonic acid,
which is a weak acid, and as a result of that,
the surface sea water, the Ph
of the surface sea water is driven towards relativity
acidic values.
>> Edward Carpenter: By the end of the century, carbon dioxide is expected
to rise to about 700 to 1,000 parts per million.
>> Jonathan Stillman: The potential solution to having an increased amount
of C02 in our atmosphere is to take that C02 and put it back
where it came from, which is trapped deep in our planet.
And in fact, a lot of fossil fuels are probably derived
from phytoplankton of millions of years ago.
So what we've been doing is culturing these cells,
the coccolithophores, under conditions of present-day Ph
and year 2100 projected Ph.
>> Tomoko Komada: The way we did that was
to first create the atmosphere that's projected
for the end of the century.
And we took some surface water from the present ocean
and bubble that with the future atmosphere.
>> Jonathan Stillman: But from our lab studies what we would predict is
that there would be less,
these coccolithophores would have less ballast.
They'd be making less inorganic carbon and less ballast to drag
down some of that organic carbon.
And so the cells would eventually be transporting less
C02 from the atmosphere down into the deep ocean.
>> Edward Carpenter: The ramification is that the ocean is not going
to be helping us to combat the increase
in the greenhouse gases.
The ocean will be much, much less capable of drawing
through the organisms that are in it, drawing the C02
out of the atmosphere and transferring it to deep water.
>> Narrator: The team's findings have implications
for other important ocean systems,
including the food chain.
They hope these findings will contribute
to future public policy regarding the reduction
of greenhouse gases.