 Hi guys, my name is Jens Müller and I'm PhD student at the Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research and last year in 2016 I published a paper on long-term alkalinity trends in the November issue of Limnology and Oceanography and the reason to investigate alkalinity trends is that we want to understand the process of ocean acidification in the Baltic Sea on a global scale and in the open ocean we see in these graphs here which are taken from a publication of Nick Bates that the increase in CO2 partial pressure that we observe worldwide is reflected in the decrease of pH over the last 20 years ocean acidification going on and This tight correlation between an increase in CO2 partial pressure and a decrease in pH only exists if the alkalinity stays constant as it is the case in the open ocean because alkalinity as a measure for the buffer capacity of seawater and If we compare this to what is going on in the Baltic Sea Then we see that for the last 20 years here where we have a high quality in monitoring data we see a consistent and linear increase in alkalinity at the rate of 3.4 micro moles per kilogram per year and This increase in alkalinity in the Baltic Sea reduces the amplification signal that we can attribute to the increase in CO2 by around 50 percent and if you are interested to Find out more about why we think that we have this alkalinity increase in the Baltic Sea or if you are Interested in speculating together about how such processes may evolve in future times or maybe even impact Conditions in the open ocean then feel free to contact me on research gate or Facebook or via email. Thanks