The Chemical Ocean Acid Test

This past summer, 35 oceanographers and marine biologists from Europe and Asia trekked to Norway’s Spitsbergen island, about 750 miles from the North Pole. Then they kept going, right into the water, and set up an elaborate system of underwater test tubes. Their mission was to study how the abundant marine life in these frigid waters will bear up under the stress of one of the world’s most daunting, if least publicized, environmental threats: the rising acidity of the oceans.