“The oceans deserve our respect and care, but you have to know something
before you can care about it.”—Sylvia Earle
***
Last June 8, the international community observed World Oceans Day with the theme, “Wonder: Sustaining what sustains us.” With this fresh perspective, the day honored the awe that the ocean evokes within us: its splendor, its enigma, and its essential function in our existence and on Earth.
On its Facebook wall, the University of the Philippines Marine Science Institute posted some reasons why we need to honor and give thanks to the ocean, our source of life. It said that oceans provide us with the following:
Food: Next to rice, Filipinos consume fish the most – 1.5 times more than meat, and thrice as much as chicken. We are highly dependent on seafood as a protein source.
Livelihood and income: Fisheries provides employment to over 2.29 million people. The country’s fisheries exports in 2023 was valued at US$1.14 billion, with the top two being tuna and seaweed products.
Tourism: Our beaches, islands, and diving spots drive our country’s tourism which employed 6.21 million people and contributed 8.6% to our gross domestic product in 2023.
Coastal protection: Mangroves protect a third of the Philippines’ coastline—more than 13,000 km lined by mangroves.
Medicine and marine biotechnology: The oceans yield life-saving medicines that cure cancer, combat viral diseases, and alleviate pain. Researchers have biobanked more than 11,000 samples from the Philippine seas that are potential sources of medicine and other high value products.
Energy: Untapped resources in the Philippines for marine renewable energy from marine solar, wave, offshore wind, tidal current, and ocean thermal energy can potentially provide over 600 gigawatts of clean energy.
From a spatial perspective, the Earth is predominantly made up of water, with land seeming to be a secondary consideration.
“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 Peter Weber, of the Washington, D.C.-based Worldwatch Institute. “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.”
From the beginning of life on Earth, oceans have served as the ecological foundation of the biosphere. However, their most significant contribution to the planet was the emergence of life itself.
Researchers assert that the earliest organisms were bacteria that originated in the ocean depths approximately four billion years ago. These bacteria were the evolutionary precursors to all later organisms and played a crucial role in establishing the conditions necessary for the evolution of life as we currently understand it.
“Only around one-tenth of 115 million square miles of the seafloor has been explored and charted,” 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 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.”
However, this “last great frontier” may soon face disappearance as well, due to the relentless emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane by humans. These gases not only gather in the atmosphere, leading to climate change, but they also penetrate the ocean floor, resulting in the acidification of the waters.
Scientists estimate that between 25% and 50% of the carbon dioxide emissions during the industrial era have been absorbed by the world’s oceans, thereby mitigating the worsening of atmospheric carbon dioxide accumulation.
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.”
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. 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. 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 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.”
