A ‘time machine’ to study the future of our oceans
8th September 2011
A new laboratory, which will simulate the
changing conditions of the seas around Scotland over the next
hundred years, has been opened at Heriot-Watt University’s
Edinburgh campus.
The quarter million pound project will
simulate rising water temperature and ocean acidification. It will
then run these conditions over an eighteen month period to see what
effects they have on native cold-water corals, an important
ecosystem which helps to support marine biodiversity.
The project is part of the UK Ocean
Acidification Research Programme, and has been funded and supported
by the Natural Environmental Research Council (NERC), the
Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), the
Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) as well as
Heriot-Watt University.
Dr J Murray Roberts, Director of Heriot-Watt’s
Centre for Marine Biodiversity & Biotechnology, leads the
project. “We hear a lot about global warming, but ocean
acidification is also caused by CO2 emissions, and
it has been dubbed the ‘climate change’s evil twin’.
“The oceans currently absorb almost a third of
the CO2 produced by burning fossil fuels and
climate change would be far worse without this. However, when
CO2 dissolves in seawater it forms carbonic acid
and as more CO2 is taken up by the oceans they move
towards a more acidic state. Ocean pH has already decreased by
about 30% and if we continue emitting CO2 at the
same rate by 2100 the acidity of the ocean will increase by
about 150%, a rate that has not been experienced for at least
400,000 years. A huge change like this in the basic chemistry of
the ocean is likely to have big implications for ocean life,
especially for those organisms, like corals, which need calcium
carbonate to build shells or skeletons.
“That’s what we want to look at, and this new
lab means that we can take samples of cold-water corals which we
have collected off the Scottish coast and see how they fare over an
eighteen month period in a simulation of what the seas and oceans
might be like in 100 years time. It’s the next best thing to having
a time machine, and the results will be important to the emerging
study of ocean acidification as well as to the future of Scotland’s
cold-water coral reefs, which we know are an important support to
biodiversity in our seas.”