Word had it that the seawater itself had begun to acidify: a change too subtle to taste, smell, or touch, but staged across the breadth of oceans in tandem with rising carbon dioxide (CO2). As the oceans took in more CO2 from the air, their baseline chemistry shifted. Marine acidification verified what seemed a very ancient fear: that even as what was coming on promised to assume the dimensions of a vast and totalizing phase shift, it unfurled presently, on a molecular and insensate scale. Would we know it, the moment when it became too late; when the oceans ceased to be infinite?
