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Covering Ocean Acidification: Chemistry and Considerations Marah Hardt and Carl Safina June 24, 2008 Changing ocean chemistry threatens the survival of marine life as much as warming temperatures. Understanding the basic chemistry of ocean acidification and the relevant consequences for people and wildlife are keys to effective journalism on an issue of growing importance and interest to media audiences.

Ocean Today Kiosk Online This website provides access to current and archived videos of the Ocean Today kiosk at the Sant Ocean Hall in the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History. The Ocean Today Kiosk is a dynamic, visitor-friendly multi-media experience that illustrates both the ocean's influence on humans and their influence upon the ocean. The website offers a transcript of the video along with links for more information.

The term ocean acidification is used to describe the ongoing decrease in ocean pH caused by human CO2 emissions, such as the burning of fossil fuels. It is the little known consequence of living in a high CO2 world, dubbed at the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP15) as the "evil twin of climate change". The oceans currently absorb approximately half of the CO2 produced by burning fossil fuel; put simply, climate change would be far worse if it were not for the oceans. However, there is a cost to the oceans - when CO2 dissolves in seawater it forms carbonic acid and as more CO2 is taken up by the oceans surface, the pH decreases, moving towards a less alkaline and therefore more acidic state. Already ocean pH has decreased by about 30% and if we continue emitting CO2 at the same rate by 2100 ocean acidity will increase by about 150%, a rate that has not been experienced for at least 400,000 years. Such a monumental alteration in basic ocean chemistry is likely to have wide implications for ocean life, especially for those organisms that require calcium carbonate to build shells or skeletons. Ocean acidification is a relatively new field of research, with most of the studies having been conducted over the last decade. While it is gaining some attention among policy makers, international leaders and the media, scientists find there is still a lack of understanding.

Global warming…the Earth is steadily getting warmer. The why is it getting warmer question will solicit so many theories that it would drive one mad to sort through them all. Global warming itself is sort of a misnomer; it is a symptom of the problem, not the cause. The cause for all the debate is whether or not the atmospheric increase of CO2 gas over the last two-hundred years has affected the Earth's climate. Recently scientists have discovered another reason to be concerned about the increasing level of atmospheric CO2. It is startling that the media and science has hardly touched upon ocean acidification. It would not be surprising if you have never heard this term. A LexisNexis search of the news wire services found in the past week there were 348 articles that mentioned global warming. Three articles contained ocean acidification. In the last 2 years, a LexisNexis search of all sources found a mere 216 articles that mentioned ocean acidification. That is a worldwide search of newspapers, magazines and wire services. The New York Times did not mention it a single time, but they ran so many Global Warming articles that there were too many matches for the page to display.

About the College Board Standards for College Success (CBSCS) The College Board Standards for College Success (CBSCS) define the knowledge and skills students need to develop and master in English language arts, mathematics and statistics, and science in order to be college and career ready. The CBSCS outline a clear and coherent pathway to Advanced Placement® (AP®) and college readiness with the goal of increasing the number and diversity of students who are prepared not only to enroll in college, but to succeed in college and 21st-century careers. The College Board has published these standards freely to provide a national model of rigorous academic content standards that states, districts, schools and teachers may use to vertically align curriculum, instruction, assessment and professional development to AP and college readiness. These rigorous standards: provide a model set of comprehensive standards for middle school and high school courses that lead to college and workplace readiness; reflect 21st-century skills such as problem solving, critical and creative thinking, collaboration, and media and technological literacy; articulate clear standards and objectives with supporting, in-depth performance expectations to guide instruction and curriculum development; provide teachers, districts and states with tools for increasing the rigor and alignment of courses across grades 6-12 to college and workplace readiness; and assist teachers in designing lessons and classroom assessments.

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goes with: The pH Factor (http://www.miamisci.org/ph/) and Alien Juice Bar (http://sv.berkeley.edu/showcase/flash/juicebar.html)