Oceans welling up from the depths along the Pacific Coast from Canada to Mexico, threatening a variety of marine organisms as carbon dioxide saturate the water and increase its corrosive acidity, government scientists report. Now the world's oceans take up tons of the global warming gas each year, and thus help to slow the pace of climate change, but the benefit is far outweighed by severe and damaging changes in water's chemistry, according to seagoing oceanographers.

In separate recent reports in the journal Science and in congressional testimony, the scientists warn that the rate of 'ocean acidification' is mounting, and say damage to some of the most essential deep sea living organisms in the ocean's food web is becoming more apparent. The acid can put in danger all sorts of marine animals, from shells to microscopic plankton to the beaks of giant squid, biologists are finding from seagoing studies and laboratory experiments.

A chemical oceanographer in Seattle, Richard Feely with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, estimates that the world's oceans have become at least 30% more acidic since the Industrial Age began more than 200 years ago, and that if greenhouse gas emissions continue hysterical, the world's oceans by this century will become 150% more acidic than they are today. "While the changes are alarming, it's practically impossible to predict how this unprecedented acidification will affect entire ecosystems," says Ken Caldeira, an atmospheric scientist with the Carnegie Institute's Department of Global Ecology at Stanford.