University of Tasmania, Australia

Southern Ocean uptake of CO² and ocean acidification

The oceans are a major store of anthropogenic CO². The project will undertake synthesis of CO² and related data collected over a number of years to determine the progress of acidification in the polar waters to the South of Australia. The work is significant because the Southern Ocean is one of the regions expected to become undersaturated with the biogenic shell-forming mineral, aragonite, by the middle of this century. The changes are likely to have serious consequences for pelagic and benthic marine ecosystems. This project may involve field work in the Southern Ocean or Antarctica. The research will involve some work with ocean carbon cycle modellers to check modelled predictions of acidification against observations, and to use the results to make predictions of future changes. The project will be co-supervised by Tom Trull from the Institute of Marine and Antarctic Studies at UTAS and Bronte Tilbrook from CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research, under the aegis of the ‘Ocean Control of CO²’ research program of the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre.