Will ocean acidification affect marine microbes?

Author Posting. © The Author(s), 2010. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Nature Publishing Group for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in The ISME Journal 5 (2011): 1-7, doi:10.1038/ismej.2010.79.The pH of the surface ocean is changing as a result of increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) and there are concerns about potential impacts of lower pH and associated alterations in seawater carbonate chemistry on the biogeochemical processes in the ocean. However, it is important to place these changes within the context of pH in the present day ocean, which is not constant; it varies systematically with season, depth and along productivity gradients. Yet this natural variability in pH has rarely been considered in assessments of the effect of ocean acidification on marine microbes. Surface pH can change as a consequence of microbial utilisation and production of carbon dioxide, and to a lesser extent other microbiallymediated processes such as nitrification. Useful comparisons can be made with microbes in other aquatic environments that readily accommodate very large and rapid pH change. For example, in many freshwater lakes, pH changes that are orders of magnitude greater than those projected for the 22nd century oceans can occur over periods of hours. Marine and freshwater assemblages have always experienced variable pH conditions. Therefore, an appropriate null hypothesis may be, until evidence is obtained to the contrary, that major biogeochemical processes in the oceans other than calcification will not be fundamentally different under future higher CO2 / lower pH conditions.Funding from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and logistical support from the Plymouth Marine Laboratory and the Center for Microbial Oceanography: Research and Education (National Science Foundation grant EF-0424599) are gratefully acknowledged

Petrographic notes on the Ribeira series in the State of Sao Paulo

The author proposes that the tilted and epimetamorphic rocks occurring in the upper Riebira River, composed mainly of argillaceous sediments, should be detached from the top of the Sao Roque series, under the name of Ribeira series. In an isoclinal fold of this series near Iporanga, he discovered, in 1932, a 50-meter bed of a polygenic conglomerate whit sericitic cement, that he found to be a tillite. This formation was called Iporanga. In the following year, the writer and Dr. T. Knecht observed the great extent of the conglomerates, which were seen from the Pilões River up to the Pardo River, in the limits of the Sao Paulo and Paraná States. In 1938, the geologists T Knecht and J. Felicissimo Jor. described the same conglomerates at Pariquera-Assú, in the Lower Ribeira. The Ribeira series joins phyllites, slates, graphitic sandstones, arkoses and tillites, and has been traversed by, quartz veins, and dikes of grorudite and basic rocks. The author suggests the correlation of the Ribeira series (São Paulo and Paraná) with the Itajai (Santa Catarina). Lavras (Minas Gerais e Baia) and Corumbá (Mato Grosso) series, supposed to be Upper Algonkian or more likely Eocambrian. In all these series arkoses and tillites have been found, proving the existence of an inlandsis in South America at teh Early Paleozoic tim