World’s oceans in ‘shocking’ decline
“The findings are shocking,” said Alex Rogers, IPSO’s scientific director and professor of conservation biology at Oxford University. “As we considered the cumulative effect of what humankind does to the oceans, the implications became far worse than we had individually realised…we’re seeing changes that are happening faster than we’d thought, or in ways that we didn’t expect to see for hundreds of years.”
These “accelerated” changes include melting of Arctic sea ice and the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, sea level rise, and release of methane trapped in the sea bed.
Methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Its release is a very, very, very bad thing.
But more worrying than this, the team noted, are the ways in which different issues act synergistically to increase threats to marine life.
Some pollutants, for example, stick to the surfaces of tiny plastic particles that are now found in the ocean bed.
This increases the amounts of these pollutants that are consumed by bottom-feeding fish.
And I suppose we ingest those pollutants too, when we eat those fish. Garbage in, garbage out, and on it goes.
In a wider sense, ocean acidification, warming, local pollution and overfishing are acting together to increase the threat to coral reefs - so much so that three-quarters of the world’s reefs are at risk of severe decline.
People already skilled at deep-sea diving are lucky. You’ll get to the reefs before they’re gone (Great Barrier, for example, is estimated to be dead or dying within a few decades).
Life on Earth has gone through five “mass extinction events” caused by events such as asteroid impacts; and it is often said that humanity’s combined impact is causing a sixth such event.
The report also notes that previous mass extinction events have been associated with trends being observed now - disturbances of the carbon cycle, and acidification and hypoxia (depletion of oxygen) of seawater.
250 million years ago, ocean anoxia (caused by toxic ash from volcanoes, analogous to fossil-fuel burning of today) killed 95% of all marine species during the Permian extinction event. Why is humanity hell-bent on duplicating this?