Not a single bit of any of the oceans of the world has been completely untouched by human activity, according a to a new study. Nowhere has escaped our actions: from fishing to pollution to human-induced global warming, we have left a grand total of zero percent of our oceans in a totally pristine state for future generations.
The study, presented at this year’s meeting of the prestigious AAAS in Boston, paints a rather bleak picture of our planet, considering that two-thirds of Planet Earth’s surface is ocean. But wait a minute – there’s loads of places in Antarctica that humans have never even seen, let alone poured sewage and oil into. How can they not be pristine?
The problem is down to the menace we hear so much of these days: global warming. Fortunately must of the oceans around Antarctica have been designated ‘very low human impact’ in this study, but climate change has still had an effect.
Go to other areas of the world (click here for a flyover video of the map), such as the East and South China seas where there are already loads of problems like intensive overfishing and fertilizer runoff into the ocean, and then add global warming to the equation – this could be the tipping point that is just too much for out oceans.
The East coast of the U.S., the seas around the British Isles and the Caribbean were also highlighted as potential disaster zones.
Perhaps one of the most important messages from this study is that our oceans are going to be in a bad enough state because of human-induced global warming alone, so when you add on all the other factors – such as overfishing and pollution – you start to realize that unless we want to damage our oceans so badly that they can never recover, we really need to do something. And we need to do it fast.
Filed under: Exploration, Nature, Science | Tagged: AAAS, Antarctica, climate change, coral, coral reef, coral reefs, Environment, fish, global warming, green, H2O, life, news, ocean, oceans, pollution, sea, seas, water
