Topic
Rising seawater acidity since the Industrial Revolution and its effects on calcifying marine organisms.
Chinese researchers grew a diatom for 880 days and found high CO2 cut its phosphorus per unit carbon by about 26% when phosphate was scarce. The cells still grew faster, so in this species extra CO2 changed what the plankton are made of as well as how fast they multiply.
Reality
More than 60 scientists, in the Potsdam Institute's 2026 Planetary Health Check, find seven of nine planetary boundaries crossed and still worsening. Six of the seven are boundaries other than climate change, and three of those share its red danger zone.
Reality
The annual Planetary Health Check counts seven of nine boundaries transgressed, ocean acidification among them since 2025, and puts carbon dioxide at 426 parts per million against 280 before industrialisation. More than 60 scientists signed it.
Reality
Houshuo Jiang filmed free-swimming eastern oyster larvae at 2,000 frames per second and found their shells make them dense enough that gravity, not the drag of swimming, drives the current that carries food to the mouth.
Reality
A Flinders University study in Marine Ecology used neutron activation analysis to track how acidified seawater changes what two diatom species take up, and the authors still want the carbon-pump consequence tested.
Reality
Five enclosure campaigns since 2021 have dosed real plankton communities with crushed rock. Marine CDR buyers get biology data out of it, not the permanence answer.
Reality