Understanding marine pollution would be a great way to improve your knowledge on saving the ocean. Children as our next generation is necessary to know and involved in saving the ocean. This article from National Geographic is especially written for grade five to eight, to help them understand Marine Pollution in an easy way using basic vocabularies.
Marine Pollution
Marine pollution is a growing problem in today’s world. Our ocean is being flooded with two main types of pollution: chemicals and trash.
Marine pollution is a combination of chemicals and trash, most of which comes from land sources and is washed or blown into the ocean. This pollution results in damage to the environment, to the health of all organisms, and to economic structures worldwide. (National Geographic)
Chemical contamination, or nutrient pollution, is concerning for health, environmental, and economic reasons. This type of pollution occurs when human activities, notably the use of fertilizer on farms, lead to the runoff of chemicals into waterways that ultimately flow into the ocean. The increased concentration of chemicals, such as nitrogen and phosphorus, in the coastal ocean promotes the growth of algal blooms, which can be toxic to wildlife and harmful to humans. The negative effects on health and the environment caused by algal blooms hurt local fishing and tourism industries. (National Geographic)
Marine trash encompasses all manufactured products—most of them plastic—that end up in the ocean. Littering, storm winds, and poor waste management all contribute to the accumulation of this debris, 80 percent of which comes from sources on land. Common types of marine debris include various plastic items like shopping bags and beverage bottles, along with cigarette butts, bottle caps, food wrappers, and fishing gear. Plastic waste is particularly problematic as a pollutant because it is so long-lasting. Plastic items can take hundreds of years to decompose. (National Geographic)
Solutions for marine pollution include prevention and cleanup. Disposable and single-use plastic is abundantly used in today’s society, from shopping bags to shipping packaging to plastic bottles. Changing society’s approach to plastic use will be a long and economically challenging process. Cleanup, in contrast, may be impossible for some items. Many types of debris (including some plastics) do not float, so they are lost deep in the ocean. Plastics that do float tend to collect in large “patches” in ocean gyres. The Pacific Garbage Patch is one example of such a collection, with plastics and microplastics floating on and below the surface of swirling ocean currents between California and Hawaii in an area of about 1.6 million square kilometers (617,763 square miles), although its size is not fixed. These patches are less like islands of trash and, as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says, more like flecks of microplastic pepper swirling around an ocean soup. Even some promising solutions are inadequate for combating marine pollution. So-called “biodegradable” plastics often break down only at temperatures higher than will ever be reached in the ocean. (National Geographic)
Vocabulary
organism
- living or once-living thing
nutrient
- substance an organism needs for energy, growth, and life
runoff
- overflow of fluid from a farm or industrial factory
algal bloom
- the rapid increase of algae in an aquatic environment
plastic
- chemical material that can be easily shaped when heated to a high temperature
debris
- remains of something broken or destroyed; waste, or garbage
pollutant
- chemical or other substance that harms a natural resource
biodegradable
- able to decompose naturally
© The contents in this post belongs to the National Geographic.
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