Image: Columbia
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"This could be the closest geological analog to modern ocean acidification," study coauthor Bärbel Hönisch, a paleoceanographer at Columbia, said in a statement. "As massive as it was, it still happened about 10 times more slowly than what we are doing today." I followed up to confirm the comment, and Hönisch replied by email:"The acidity of seawater is measured by its concentration of hydrogen ions," Hönisch wrote. "This concentration has increased byIn the oceans, carbonate sediments dissolved, some organisms went extinct and others evolved. Scientists have long suspected that ocean acidification caused the crisis—similar to today, as manmade CO2 combines with seawater to change its chemistry. Now, for the first time, scientists have quantified the extent of surface acidification from those ancient days, and the news is not good: the oceans are on track to acidify at least as much as they did then, only at a much faster rate.