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Originally Posted by aerohead
It may want to wait a few hundred thousand years. Marine biologists are confident that carbonic acid from CO2 entering the oceans will prevent shellfish and crustaceans from forming shells in the not-so-far future.
Any calcium carbonate formed on a ferrous armature during electrodeposition would just dissolve and return to solution.
You can take a piece of hamburger in the evening, and drop it into freshly-opened Coca-Cola, and by morning, it will be 'gone.
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You're conflating acidification with acid. The oceans will never be acidic.
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When we look back through the geological record, we see that for much of the last 500 million years there was an abundance of life in the oceans and that atmospheric carbon dioxide was much higher than today for the vast majority of that time. Though it may seem counterintuitive, especially considering that ocean pH was lower than present-day, the ancient oceans were generally more hospitable to marine calcification (building shells or skeletons of calcium carbonate) than they are now [Arvidson et al (2013)].
Numerous examples exist to support this, such as the enormous coccolith deposits that make up the White Cliffs of Dover in England. These tiny coccolith shells are made of calcium carbonate (chalk) and date from the Cretaceous Period (Cretaceous is Latin for chalk) about 145 to 65 million years ago - when atmospheric CO2 concentration was several times that of today. So conducive to marine calcification was the Cretaceous ocean that it also saw the emergence of giant shellfish called rudists as a major reef-builder.
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Shellfish arrived when ocean pH was way lower than it is today, or the foreseeable future.
We're probably underestimating how rapidly creatures can adapt to change. I'm reminded of that example they teach in high school of a peppered moth that turned into a black moth relatively quickly in response to pollutants creating a black environment.
That's not to say that rapid climate change is trivial, but it is a denial of apocalyptic doom.
Finally, we'll probably be genetically modifying most creatures we care about in the future. It will probably be trivial to create crabs that survive lower pH even decades from now, as an example.
Our capacity to not only adapt ourselves to a changing environment, but other creatures, will be insanely better in the future.
We're entering the Golden Era. I'm only sad knowing I won't be around in a thousand years to see just how great everything is.