Human Activity and its Impact on the Oceans
Although we have explored less than five percent of our vast oceans, humans have set them on a path to devastation long before we could discover the rest. Mark Prigg for dailymail.com warns by the end of the century, the oceans will have been damaged to an irreversible point. Without the oceans, the global climate cannot be regulated, where the world’s environmental state would then be far worse than what we have seen to be possible by, for example, global warming. It begins with our oceans becoming filled with various forms of waste by humans, atmospheric changes causing acidity in water increase, and imbalances of organism life leading to lower levels of oxygen. How the oceans may die is crucial
Fertiliser from farms flow down rivers and streams into the oceans and cause an imbalance in the food chain. Excess nutrients in the fertiliser cause phytoplankton and algae populations to grow rapidly out of control. When this unusual amount of organisms die, an unusual amount of bacterial organisms also has to amass to consume and decay the dead organisms. These oxygen-consuming bacteria consume an unhealthy amount of oxygen from the water, leaving oxygen levels so low that it is difficult for other organisms to survive in the environment, driving them away or killing them. It is a long process from human carelessness to degraded habitat from organisms, but it is an incredibly harmful issue. Other chemicals and waste that travels from the farms or runoff from the land into the oceans may also change the balance of the water. The outcome of unregulated chemicals and nutrients flowing from farms and other industries into the oceans, marine life can no longer live in the water they once thrived
Global warming not only affects the atmospheric temperatures around the world, but the ocean’s temperatures as well. Carbon dioxide is regulated by the process the oceans are essential for, the absorbing and recycling of carbon dioxide, but it cannot function correctly and is overwhelmed when there is an unusually high level of it is in the atmosphere. It is observed, and shared by conserve-energy-future.com, that the oceans cannot regulate this rising amount of carbon dioxide as the harmful temperatures rise alongside the growth of it in the atmosphere, all due to global warming. The oceans are also being affected by the atmosphere in another way, added by conserve-energy-future.com, informing that acid rains lead to a rise of acidity in the water. These two problems, as a whole, “impacts primarily the ecosystems and fish communities that live in the ocean.”. This is indicating that even more strain is being put on inhabitants in oceans because they are overwhelmed and possibly killed because of the rise in temperatures and