The many dangers facing world oceans
The world's oceans are under threat. What can be done to protect marine life and biodiversity?
Life on earth began in the ocean. These vast expanses of salty, nutrient-filled water are the reason life exists in such abundance. Oceans cover 70% of the world's surface and constitute 99% of habitable space.
The seas are a lifeline, accounting for 97% of the earth's water supply and emitting more than 50% of the world's oxygen. Around the world, roughly 1.25 billion people rely on fish as their primary source of protein.
Oceans are vital to life on earth in countless ways. But now a toxic cocktail of climate change, irresponsible fishing and careless consumption is putting marine life and biodiversity in danger.
“You can reduce the threats to the ocean to two things,” Roderic Mast, president and CEO of the Oceanic Society, a nonprofit organisation dedicated to marine conservation, told The World Weekly. “Everything people put into the oceans and everything they take out of them.”
Carbon dioxide is one of the most harmful substances to our oceans. The seas have absorbed one third of the carbon dioxide that humans have put into the atmosphere since the industrial revolution. The rise in carbon levels has left our oceans warmer and more acidic than ever before.
The negative effects of warming waters are most evident at the two poles. In these high latitude seas, temperatures are changing three to four times more quickly than anywhere else, elevating sea levels, altering underwater habits and changing migration patterns.
Read the full article on The World Weekly