Special Issue Article
Signal of Climate Change through Decadal Variation of Aquatic pH in Indian Sundarbans
HK Jana1, S Zaman2, P Pramanick2*, N Mukhopadhyay3, R Bose2, A Mitra2, Tanmay Ray Chaudhuri4 and AK Raha41 Department of Microbiology, Panskura Banamali College, Purba Midnapur West Bengal, India
2 Department of Oceanography, Techno India University, Salt lake Campus, Kolkata, India
3 Department of Chemistry, Gargi Memorial Institute of Technology, Baruipur, Kolkata, India
4 Department of Forest and Environmental Science, Techno India University, Kolkata, India
- *Corresponding Author:
- Pramanick P
Department of Oceanography
Techno India University
Salt lake Campus, Kolkata -700091, India
Tel: 09831269550
E-mail: ppramanick660@gmail.com
Received date December 20, 2013; Accepted date January 17, 2014; Published date January 24, 2014
Citation: HK Jana, Zaman S, Pramanick P, Mukhopadhyay N, Bose R, et al. (2014) Signal of Climate Change through Decadal Variation of Aquatic pH in Indian Sundarbans. J Marine Sci Res Development S11:003. doi:10.4172/2155-9910.S11-003
Copyright: © 2014 HK Jana, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Repeat and time series data for 30 years in the western Indian Sundarbans exhibit direct evidence for acidification of estuarine water. The long-term trend in surface water pH is interpreted as signal of climate changeand its possible causes are briefly outlined in this first-order analysis. The significant spatio-temporal variation of surface water pH can be attributed to factors like intrusion into the estuary from Bay of Bengal, sewage discharge (from point and nonpoint sources) and photosynthetic activity by the mangrove vegetation that exhibit variable biomass and area around the selected stations. The sudden rise of surface water pH during 2009 in all the stations is a direct consequence of sea water intrusion during AILA, a super cyclone that hit Sundarbans on 25th May, 2009. The significant negative correlation of mangrove vegetation pool (assessed from AwiFS data for June 2010) with percentage of pH fall (r = - 0.6978; p <0.01) strongly supports the positive influence of mangrove photosynthetic activity in shifting the equilibrium towards alkalinity.
