“The oceans are Earth’s largest habitat, home to billions of plants and animals – the vast majority of the living things on the planet. Reuters has discovered how, due to a climate crisis beneath the waves, marine creatures are fleeing for their lives, and the communities that depend on them are facing disruption as a result.” — Reuters
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Andrew Griffin, in an article which appeared in Independent, wrote: “There is a 90 percent chance that the world’s temperature will rise 2°C to 4.9°C above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century, despite measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”
There is no turning back when it comes to climate change. It is for real and it is happening right now. According to scientists, between 25% and 50% of the carbon dioxide emissions over the industrial period have been absorbed by the world’s oceans, thus preventing atmospheric carbon dioxide build-up from becoming worse.
“Two hundred years ago, the amount of carbon dioxide in the ocean was around 200 ppm (parts per million). Now it is nearly 400 ppm. If people continue their business as usual, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC)… predicts that it will be more than 500 ppm at the end of the century,” Dr. Edgardo Gomez, the founding director of the University of the Philippines Marine Science Institute, pointed out.
Reuters, an international news dispatch, found out that oceans have undergone unprecedented warming in the last few decades.
“Currents have shifted,” it pointed out. “These changes are for the most part invisible from land, but this hidden climate change has had a disturbing impact on marine life – in effect, creating an epic underwater refugee crisis.”
For more than a year, Reuters reporters and photographers have been collecting stories and little-reported data for a series revealing this natural disaster unfolding beneath the whitecaps. The result: “Ocean Shock.”
One of their findings is that fish are moving 10 times farther on average than land animals affected by rising temperatures. “As waters warm, fish and other sea life are migrating poleward, seeking to maintain the even temperatures they need to thrive. The number of creatures involved in this massive diaspora may well dwarf any climate impacts yet seen on land.”
In the U.S. North Atlantic, fisheries data show that in recent years, at least 85% of the nearly 70 federally tracked species have shifted north or deeper, or both, when compared with their long-term average locations.
But there’s one big shift: the lobster: “In recent years, once-bountiful lobster catches in Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts have collapsed. Now, Maine is booming, with about 85% of the haul. But old-timers fear the species will continue shifting north to Canada.”
More bad news. As recently as the 1980s, Portuguese fishermen each year caught as much as 110,000 tons of sardines – the maritime nation’s favorite seafood. They are now limited to 14,000 tons and face further limits on their iconic dish.
In Japan, on the other hand, overfishing and fluctuating temperatures have shrunk the stock of a beloved snack food – the flying squid – and shifted its range north, making the creature increasingly impractical to catch.
“As recently as 2011, fishermen were hauling in more than 200,000 tons a year,” Reuters reported. “That had fallen by three-fourths to 53,000 tons last year.”
This is indeed very disturbing. “For the first in this century, world marine fish catches are declining,” deplored Greenpeace, the international environmental organization. “Many of the world’s formerly productive fisheries are seriously depleted, and some have collapsed due to overfishing.”
In the past, we thought no one can destroy our oceans. But we are wrong. “Once thought to be so vast and resilient that no level of human assault could damage them, the oceans are now crying out for attention,” noted a report released by the Washington-based Worldwatch Institute.
“The world’s oceans are in danger, and the enormity of the challenge is bigger than one country or organization,” the World Bank said in a statement during the World Oceans Summit held in Singapore some years back.
From the objectivity of space, the earth is overwhelmingly composed of water. Land appears almost as an afterthought. “Oceans cover nearly 71% of the earth’s surface, and their deepest trenches plunge farther below sea level than Mount Everest climbs about it,” writes Worldwatch’s Peter Weber. “They contain 97% of the water on earth, and more than 10,000 times as much as all the world’s freshwater lakes and rivers combined.”
Since the dawn of life on earth, oceans have been the ecological keel of the biosphere. But their seminal contribution to the planet was life itself. Scientists believe that the very organisms were bacteria that developed in the depths of the seas some four billion years ago. These were the evolutionary forerunners of all subsequent organisms and helped create the conditions under which life as it is now known could evolve.
“Only around one-tenth of 115 million square miles of the sea floor has been explored and chartered,” notes Donald Hinrichsen, an award-winning journalist and author of Coastal Waters of the World: Trends, Threats, and Strategies.
Some marine scientists estimated that the sea floor alone may contain up to 10 million species, the majority of them undiscovered. “But no one knows for sure,” Hinrichsen pointed out. “The ocean is our last great frontier.”
