Bi virtue of Presidential Proclamation No. 57, issued in 1999, we celebrate the month of May as the Month of the Ocean. In contrast, the United Nations declares every June as the ocean month.
The PP 57 states: “Coastal and marine resources provide both economic and ecological benefits, such as food, livelihood, recreation and other services, as well as biodiversity, aesthetic value, and shoreline protection.”
While there is only one global ocean, the vast body of water that covers 71% of the Earth is geographically divided into distinct named regions.
When we were still in college, there were only four oceans: the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, and Arctic. In recent years, however, most countries – including the United States – now recognize the Southern (Antarctic) as the fifth ocean.
We are more familiar with the Pacific Ocean since our country is near it. A portion of the Pacific Ocean is located at the Philippine Sea, a section of the western North Pacific Ocean, lying east and north of the Philippines.
“The floor of this portion of the ocean is formed into a structural basin by a series of geologic folds and faults that protrude above the surface in the form of bordering island arcs,” the Encyclopedia Britannica states.
The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest ocean on earth. “To get a sense of just how immense the Pacific Ocean is, you could put all the Earth’s landmass together, and the Pacific would still be larger,” National Geographic said.
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 seafloor has been explored and charted,” wrote Donald Hinrichsen, an award-winning journalist and author of Coastal Waters of the World: Trends, Threats, and Strategies.
Some marine scientists estimated that the seafloor 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.”\
But this “last great frontier” is not spared from destruction. Thanks to the continuous emission of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane. These gases don’t only accumulate in the atmosphere, causing climate change, but they also sink into the seafloor causing the waters to acidify.
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,” explained Dr. Edgardo Gomez, the founding director of the University of the Philippines Marine Science Institute.
The acidification, Dr. Gomez added, may be gradual but would happen simultaneously all over the world. He warned that it would be worse than the acidification of agricultural lands due to the use of chemical fertilizers.
“Land is more manageable. With the use of organic fertilizer and chemicals, land can easily recover. But once the ocean becomes acidic, it would take millions of years to bring back their natural (state),” Dr. Gomez said.
According to a study which appeared in the journal Science, the current acidification may be worse than during four major mass extinctions in history when natural pulses of carbon from asteroid impacts and volcanic eruptions caused global temperatures to soar.
“We know that life during past ocean acidification events was not wiped out – new species evolved to replace those that died off,” noted Dr. Barbel Honisch, a paleoceanographer at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, and lead author of the study. “But if carbon emissions continue at the current pace, we may lose organisms we care about – coral reefs, oysters, salmon.”
Dr. Honisch and colleagues said the current rate of ocean acidification is at least 10 times faster than it was 56 million years ago. “The geological record suggests that the current acidification is potentially unparalleled in at least the last 300 million years of Earth history, and raises the possibility that we are entering an unknown territory of marine ecosystem change,” said co-author Dr. Andy Ridgwell of Bristol University.
As made clear by the IPCC, the ocean is taking the brunt of warming in the climate system, with direct and well-documented physical and biogeochemical consequences. The impacts which continued warming is projected to have in the decades to 2050 include the following: reduced seasonal ice zones, including the disappearance of Arctic summer sea ice by ca. 2037; increasing stratification of ocean layers, leading to oxygen depletion; and increased incidence of anoxic and hypoxic (low oxygen) events.
That’s not all. There is also some evidence that the oxygen inventory of the ocean is progressively declining. Predictions for ocean oxygen content suggest a decline of between 1% and 7% by 2100. Experts say this is occurring in two ways: the broad trend of decreasing oxygen levels in tropical oceans and areas of the North Pacific over the last 50 years; and the dramatic increase in coastal hypoxia (low oxygen) associated with eutrophication. The former is caused by climate change, the second by increased nutrient runoff from agriculture and sewage.
The ‘deadly trio’ of the above three stressors – acidification, warming and deoxygenation – is seriously affecting how productive and efficient the ocean is, as temperatures, chemistry, surface stratification, nutrient and oxygen supply are all implicated, meaning that many organisms will find themselves in unsuitable environments.
“These impacts will have cascading consequences for marine biology, including altered food web dynamics and the expansion of pathogens,” the IPCC said.
As if those are not enough, nearly 270,000 tons of plastic, which is enough to fill more than 38,500 garbage trucks, is floating in the world’s oceans. This was based on a study done by 5 Gyres Institute, an organization that aims to reduce plastic in the oceans.
The recent finding is comparable to an earlier study done by researchers in Spain who used different methodology. The said study estimated “there were 7,000 to 35,000 tons of plastics this size floating in the ocean.”
These plastics are likely to stay in the oceans. “Plastics persist for up to 50 years and, because they are usually buoyant, they are widely distributed by ocean currents and wind,” notes World Resources Institute.
Oil is another widespread pollutant in the oceans. In the Philippines, the sinking of a Caltex oil tanker in Limay, Bataan in 1990 comes to mind. Although it was much smaller in proportions – when compared to the 11 million gallons of oil spilled from the Exxon Superlaner Valdez in Alaska in 1989 – it gave Filipinos a preview of the potential hazards of oil spills.
Continued overfishing is serving to further undermine the resilience of ocean systems, and contrary to some claims, despite some improvements largely in developed regions, fisheries management is still failing to halt the decline of key species and damage to the ecosystems on which marine life depends.
“For the first time 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.”
“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,” said a report released by the Washington-based Worldwatch Institute.
