Free Ocean CO2 Enrichment of the Antarctic Sea Floor: ANTFOCE

Polar communities are expected to experience the impacts of ocean acidification sooner and more heavily than other regions, and serve as indicators of the consequences we can expect from increasing ocean CO2 concentrations. Few studies to date have focused on impacts of acidification on in situ benthic communities, and none on in situ polar benthic communities. The development of Free Ocean CO2 Enrichment (FOCE) technology makes possible antFOCE: a replicated 4 month low pH (0.4 below ambient) experiment on the Antarctic sea floor near Casey Station (66°S, 110°E) to quantify responses in microbial, macrofauna and meiofauna community composition (e.g. crustacea, molluscs, annelids, diatoms, protists, bacteria), recruitment processes (via settlement tiles), bioturbation (via luminophores) and biogeochemical cycling processes (via flux measurements) and the vulnerability of key species (e.g. calcifiers) under high ocean CO2 conditions. This polar application of FOCE will contribute to the growing worldwide network of in situ tropical (cpFOCE) and temperate (dpFOCE, eFOCE, swFOCE) community-scale experiments to better understand likely marine ecosystem change from the tropics to the poles as a result of ocean acidification.