Ocean Acidification is one of our most important yet hardly visible environmental issues to date. Decades of immense carbon absorption have slowly changed the biochemical makeup of the world's ocean. Seawater´s pH turns progressively more acidic, which leaves small and vital organisms such as shellfish, corals & plankton vulnerable to vanish under pressure of their changing environment (IPCC 2019).
For this research into marine worlds in a high carbon Pacific, I turn to oyster farmers in the USA, who have seen mass die-offs of their oyster stock due to ocean acidification. I combine anthropological methodology with natural science observation in laboratory and ship-based fieldwork to trace marine scientific knowledge making in the Southern Pacific. During fieldwork in Aotearoa New Zealand I look to local and indigenous marine restoration practices in coastal habitats, in anticipation of coastal acidification events. Finally, the work critically follows more-than-human, future oriented visions of carbon capture and bioremediation approaches via kelp farming. Taken together these cases provide a window into the situated realities of an abstract and outsized ocean change phenomenon such as OA.
