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Mapping Oceans Reveals Our Impact
by Yesterday, the NYTimes featured an article on the ways we're changing oceans... and the report sounds dismal:
....scientists are building the first worldwide portrait of such dispersed human impacts on the oceans, revealing a planet-spanning mix of depleted resources, degraded ecosystems and disruptive biological blending as species are moved around the globe by accident and intent.
So what's going on? Well, in the Feb. 15 issue of Science, Benjamin Halpern and colleagues at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis published their research which mapped 17 kinds of human ocean impacts including destructive fishing practices, shipping, invasive species, pollution, runoff, and beyond. The article reports that the continental shelves and slopes are the most heavily impacted areas, especially along coasts with high population densities.
Halpern's team found that near forty percent of ocean areas have been strongly impacted by us with a mere four percent remaining pristine. This is the story of what we're doing to oceans--70% of our planet-- and we're now only beginning to understand the implications.
And remember ocean acidification? Well, the article suggests that yes--we really do have something serious to be concerned about as we alter ocean pH:
The most widespread human fingerprint is a slow drop in the pH of surface waters around the world as a portion of the billions of tons of carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere from fuel and forest burning each year is absorbed in water, where it forms carbonic acid. That progressive shift in ocean chemistry could eventually disrupt shell-forming plankton and reef-building species, particularly where other impacts, including rising temperatures from human-caused global warming, create simultaneous stresses, many marine biologists say.
Check out this great interactive map and readers with access to the journal Science can read the full article here.
Tags: ocean impact map
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