The reason you don't let a bottle of soda get hot in your car is the same for why the warming sea is so dangerous: Boom, fizz, you've got a mess on your hands.
floating in the water column, Bialik doesn’t know. “They could probably form around any nucleation center,” says Bialik. “I suspect that microplastics may also be a possible one. But as scientists love to say, more research is needed.”. So much so, Bialik calculates, that they account for perhaps 15 percent of the gas that the Mediterranean Sea emits to the atmosphere., both from the water belching it up and from the proliferating crystals, its acidity actually goes.
That should be great for the calcifiers, right? Not necessarily. “Many of them have specific temperature ranges in which they can build their shells—not too hot, not too cold,” says Bialik. So even if the sea is getting less acidic as it warms, that heat stresses these organisms in a different way. It’s not clear whether aragonite crystals are forming in more places around the world. Scientists are already aware of “whiting events,” in which calcium carbonate precipitates in much more obvious ways, turning the waters around the Bahamas and in the Persian Gulf a milky color. In the Eastern Mediterranean, there wasn’t an obvious whiting event to clue in Bialik and his colleagues. Instead, they stumbled upon the crystals in their sediment traps.
“This is a somewhat unique area with a variety of conditions that have to happen to make this work,” says marine chemist Andrew Dickson of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, who wasn’t involved in the research. “The question then is, to what degree is that environment really special, or is it common around the oceans? And I don't have a clear picture of that in my mind.”
It may be that the conditions in the eastern Mediterranean aren’t replicated in many other places, so Dickson is leaning toward the idea that this may not be particularly common. But Bialik points out that wherever it may be happening, it could be causing a climate problem: Aragonite crystal formation may mess with the water’s ability to absorb atmospheric CO“I won't say we fully understand this yet and fully understand what governs it—when it turns on and when it shuts down,” says Bialik.
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