The five essential points for understanding the threats to the world’s oceans

The five basic points for understanding the threats to the world’s oceans

On June 8 every year, the world celebratesWorld Oceans Day, a day proposed by the Canadian International Center for Ocean Development and the Canadian Ocean Institute in 1992, during the work of the Earth Summit – the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Then in 2008, the United Nations adopted the celebration of this day; Highlighting the importance of marine systems, and how we can preserve them.

Humans depend on the world’s oceans for many things, including providing many sources of food, providing many job opportunities in fields related to the seas and oceans, as well as the many means of entertainment provided by the shores of these oceans. They also play a major role in stabilizing the climate ofEarth.

But although ocean resources may seem unlimited, human impacts – such as pollution, overfishing, and climate change – are creating what UN Secretary-General António Guterres has called an ocean emergency, as climate change pushes ocean temperatures to record levels, many fisheries are overfished, and plastic waste is accumulating in the deep sea in huge quantities.

To understand the nature of the threats facing the world’s oceans and their vital systems – in the following lines, we will review with you five basic elements that paint a clearer picture of the nature of the situation in which our oceans are experiencing.

The settlement of some species in new places

We take, for example, the invasive lionfish, which is a predatory fish that lives in the warm waters – its original home – in the Indian Ocean and the South Pacific, where it feeds on small coral reef fish. These fish have caused serious damage in the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico since they first appeared in the Atlantic Ocean in 1985, and have since spread southward to Brazil and other countries.

Lionfish represent a real danger. Because of its ability to invade tropical waters around the world, this is accompanied by significant negative impacts on local fish species and even on ecosystems between different countries. The problem here is the migration of these fish from their original habitats and settling in new places. Which disturbs the natural ecological balance in many environments.

There is no doubt that the rise in ocean temperatures has directly led to the transformation of many ecosystems to become suitable habitats for many species that we did not see in these environments, and perhaps the invasive lionfish is a clear example of this.

Ocean floor mining

Manganese blocks, spread across large areas of the ocean floor, contain rich deposits of nickel, copper, cobalt and other minerals, the demand for which has recently increased. To enter into the manufacture of batteries and renewable energy components.

The problem here is the determination of many international mining companies to begin exploring and extracting minerals from the bottom of the oceans. This is a serious danger, due to the lack of sufficient information about the nature of the biological systems at the bottom of these oceans.

To clarify the picture, accurate maps have been drawn that survey only 10% of the bottom of the oceans and deep seas, and most of the life forms discovered there have never been seen before, which means that we still have a long way to go to accurately know the nature of the vital systems at the bottom of the oceans, and any mining operations that make their way to these areas without fully knowing their nature will often lead to harm to many species in these environments. Fragile.

The spread of illegal fishing

Illegal fishing can be defined as catching fish in large quantities that exceed safe limits that allow the species to reproduce (overfishing), or catching endangered species. Overfishing causes economic losses estimated at between US$10 and US$25 billion annually, and it is unfortunately easy for these activities to take place out of sight on the high seas.

Illegal fishing represents a major challenge; Because of the difficulty of tracking ships on the high seas, ships disable their transmitters and receivers. One proposed solution was to require all ships not to disable their transponders. Then another problem arose: some ships intentionally disabled these devices to avoid pirates or attract competitors to rich fishing sites. So making it illegal to turn off their signals would not be a practical strategy.

Design of an ocean observing system

Just as there are countless life forms in the oceans that have not yet been discovered, there are also many unanswered questions about the physical processes that take place in the oceans. For example, scientists know that the ocean pulls carbon from the atmosphere and transports it to deep waters, where it can remain stored for long periods of time, but they do not know how biological and chemical transformations affect this carbon cycle.

So, scientists at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts are designing a monitoring system that could test strategies for storing more carbon in the ocean. The monitoring system will be a large network that includes various anchorages, and will use 4D sensors, which will always give us a clearer picture. In order to monitor the carbon cycle and assess the health of the oceans.

The network will also include smart gliders and autonomous vehicles that can collect data, and sensors and acoustic transceivers will be used to monitor the dark, deep-sea regions of the ocean where carbon is stored. This network will make ocean monitoring possible, and this will give decision makers a live picture – on an ongoing basis – of the state of our oceans.

Plastic pollution and its imminent danger

Over the past several decades, plastic pollution has become one of the most widespread environmental crises in the world. Every year millions of tons of plastic waste end up in the oceans, killing marine creatures, destroying ecosystems, and threatening human health.

Even if you live hundreds of kilometers from the coast, the plastic you throw away may make its way into the sea. Once plastic enters the ocean, it decomposes very slowly, turning into small pieces known as microplastics, which can enter the food chain of many organisms. It destroys marine life to an incredible extent.

In conclusion, we can only say: The marine environments in our world are living in a difficult era of pollution, which has cast a shadow on the stability of many of these environments, and with the increase in global temperatures, the future may not look bright in our oceans.