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Bob Steneck, Professor of Marine Sciences: "One way to think about ocean acidification
is like thinking about carbon monoxide in our homes. It's tasteless, it's odorless,
but it's potentially lethal at an ecosystem level. Carbon dioxide and water, which we
have plenty of on the planet in terms of oceans, form carbonic acid. We are finding that the
rate of exchange of the carbon dioxide into the oceans is much faster than we thought,
and the rate at which the ocean can equilibrate that kind of event is much slower than we
thought. So we're developing oceans so acidic that anything with limestone in its shell
is, at the very least, at a higher energy cost to just make its shell, and at worst,
its shell is going to start to erode. A lot of people don't realize that what makes a
lobster's shell hard is limestone. They're a shellfish; soft-shell clams are a shellfish.
As a matter of fact, if you look at the marine resources harvested in the state of Maine,
90 percent of the value of all Maine's resources comes from limestone-producing shellfish.
It's the highest percentage in the country.
"Well, that wouldn't be so bad if Maine wasn't at risk, but Maine's at very great risk. We
are the corner of the North Atlantic that is at risk because it's cold and at risk because
we are starved of the building blocks of limestone. On top of that, 90 percent of the species
we harvest, that we get our value from, are shell-producers. So Mainers, more than most
people, have to be worried about acidification. Yet here we are, and we know that it's a warmer
than average day, but we don't know that it's a more carbon dioxide-rich day than it has
been in possibly the last several million years.
"We clearly do have this problem of acidification, and I worry, because 83 percent of all of
our marine resources come from a single species. What happens if the lobster were to decline
significantly in abundance? This would be a disaster. You can look behind me at the
lobster traps, you can go all over the state of Maine – we have more lobster traps fished
in Maine than we have people living in the state of Maine, by about a factor of three."