This year, a paper funded by the Climate Program Office’s Global Carbon Cycle (GCC) Program was among those selected for the NOAA/OAR Outstanding Scientific Paper Award.

On Sept. 17, Dr. Rick Spinrad, Assistant Administrator in NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, and Dr. Sandy McDonald, NOAA Deputy Assistant Administrator for Laboratories and Cooperative Institutes, congratulated Richard Feely and Christopher Sabine of NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory for producing this significant paper.

The award-winning paper titled, “Evidence for Upwelling of Corrosive ‘Acidified’ Water onto the Continental Shelf” was published in Science on June 13, 2008. Feely and Sabine’s co-authors were J. Martin Hernandez-Ayon of the Instituto de Investigaciones Oceanologicas from the University of Baja California, Mexico; Debby Ianson of Fisheries and Oceans Canada in Sidney, British Columbia, and Burke Hales, of Oregon State University College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences, Corvallis, Oregon.

This paper presented evidence of corrosive water caused by the ocean’s absorption of carbon dioxide (CO2) found less than 20 miles off the west coast of North America during a field study from Canada to Mexico in the summer of 2007. The findings represented the first evidence that a large section of the North American continental shelf is seasonally impacted by ocean acidification. The term “ocean acidification” describes the process of ocean water becoming corrosive as a result of carbon dioxide being absorbed from the atmosphere. Ocean acidification could have serious impacts for marine life, particularly organisms with calcium carbonate shells, such as corals, mussels, mollusks, and small creatures in the early stages of the food chain.

The annual NOAA/OAR Outstanding Paper Awards recognize papers having exceptional originality, scientific significance, technological importance, longevity in value, quality of writing, and relevance to the NOAA mission.