Those who have spent weeks aboard the Nathaniel B. Palmer claim that the first thing you notice on the bridge is not the cold. It’s the silence. When someone yells “land ahoy” after days of seeing nothing but pale, restless grey, the moment carries more weight than it probably should. The icebreaker moves through Antarctic water with a kind of mechanical patience. That is precisely what UC Santa Cruz chemical oceanographer Phoebe Lam said during her third visit. A scientist’s sense of scale is reset by something about Antarctica.
Thousands of gallons of seawater and pieces of sea ice are being pulled onto the ship by her and 34 other people in an attempt to provide an answer to a seemingly straightforward question: what precisely is the melt sending out to sea? Because glaciers are more than just water that has frozen. When they melt, the diluted water spills into an ocean that is already taking in more carbon dioxide than it can sustain. They are frozen water with a particular chemistry, low in the carbonate minerals that shelled creatures rely on. The two modifications are stacked. The researchers are most concerned about that aspect.
For the time being at least, it is more severe in the north. Glacier Bay is preconditioned to be sensitive, according to Jeremy Mathis, director of the Ocean Acidification Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, who has been researching the bay. More CO2 is absorbed by cold water, and the surface is diluted by glacial runoff. The water turns literally corrosive when you push past a certain point. It’s not dramatic or catastrophic in a single instance, but it’s corrosive enough to break the shells of small objects.
The issue lies in the little things. The youngest oysters, known as spat, began to disappear from oyster nurseries in Oregon and Washington a few years ago, and for a while no one knew why. Upwelling—cold, acidic water rising along the coast and being piped directly into the hatcheries—turned out to be the solution. When the chemistry changed, the operators learned to close their intake valves. A workaround, not a fix. Mathis is direct about it. Recycling won’t get you out of an ocean.
Then there is the pteropod, a lentil-sized snail that floats in frigid water with a shell that appears to be almost entirely dissolved by ocean acidification. According to some estimates, about half the diet of a juvenile pink salmon. It’s the kind of thing that sticks with you when you see the chain reaction that that one fact implies. Losing the salmon means losing the snail. If you lose the salmon, you’ll lose a lot more.
Geoengineering, such as adding lime to the ocean or, in one unapproved instance off British Columbia, dumping iron to cause a phytoplankton bloom, has been discussed. None of it seems to work at scale, according to Mathis. The ocean is too big, and the carbon it already contains is too obstinate. He claims that all you can do is shut off the supply and bide your time. The length of that wait is expressed in centuries.
The asymmetry is difficult to ignore. A few generations of convenience, decades of emissions, and a change in chemistry that will last longer than anyone alive to read about it. The Palmer’s researchers are not pessimists. They are patient individuals wearing bulky coats who gather samples one bottle at a time, creating a record that will eventually need to be taken into consideration. The part that is still up in the air, somewhere between the ice and the warming sea, is whether that reckoning comes in time.
