Understanding the facts about ocean pollution may help people to have a better direction on how we can save the ocean by tackling different problems. This article from NRDC writes about these facts; it has including the factors that are causing ocean pollution and humans’ behavior that worsen the situation.
Ocean Pollution: The Dirty Facts
We’re drowning marine ecosystems in trash, noise, oil, and carbon emissions.
Covering more than 70 percent of our planet, oceans are among the earth’s most valuable natural resources. They govern the weather, clean the air, help feed the world, and provide a living for millions. They also are home to most of the life on earth, from microscopic algae to the blue whale, the largest animal on the planet. Yet we’re bombarding them with pollution. By their very nature—with all streams flowing to rivers, all rivers leading to the sea—the oceans are the end point for so much of the pollution we produce on land, however far from the coasts we may be. And from dangerous carbon emissions to choking plastic to leaking oil to constant noise, the types of ocean pollution humans generate are vast. As a result, collectively, our impact on the seas is degrading their health at an alarming rate. Here are some ocean pollution facts that everyone on our blue planet ought to know. (NRDC)
Factors
Ocean Acidification
When we burn fossil fuels, we don’t pollute just the air but the oceans, too. Indeed, today’s seas absorb as much as a quarter of all man-made carbon emissions, which changes the pH of surface waters and leads to acidification. This problem is rapidly worsening—oceans are now acidifying faster than they have in some 300 million years. It’s estimated that by the end of this century, if we keep pace with our current emissions practices, the surface waters of the ocean could be nearly 150 percent more acidic than they are now. (NRDC)
Trash in the Ocean
The majority of the garbage that enters the ocean each year is plastic—and here to stay. That’s because unlike other trash, the single-use grocery bags, water bottles, drinking straws, and yogurt containers, among eight million metric tons of the plastic items we toss (instead of recycling), won’t biodegrade. Instead, they can persist in the environment for a millennium, polluting our beaches, entangling marine life, and getting ingested by fish and seabirds. (NRDC)
Ocean Noise
The ocean is far from a “silent world.” Sound waves travel farther and faster in the sea’s dark depths than they do in the air, and many marine mammals like whales and dolphins, in addition to fish and other sea creatures, rely on communication by sound to find food, mate, and navigate. But an increasing barrage of human-generated ocean noise pollution is altering the underwater acoustic landscape, harming—and even killing—marine species worldwide. (NRDC)
Offshore Drilling
In addition to noise pollution, the oil and gas industry’s routine operations emit toxic by-products, release high levels of greenhouse gases, and lead to thousands of spills in U.S. waters annually. That oil can linger for decades and do irreversible damage to delicate marine ecosystems. Take the 1989 Exxon Valdez tanker spill in Alaska’s Prince William Sound, from which oil still remains, or the BP Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling disaster in 2010, which spread millions of gallons of oil throughout the Gulf of Mexico. But even smaller spills pollute the ocean (and the air) with long-lasting impacts. Even the most advanced cleanup efforts remove only a fraction of the oil, and sometimes they use hazardous technologies. Chemical dispersants used in the largest spill response efforts—1.8 million gallons were released into the Gulf after the BP disaster—are dangerous pollutants themselves. (NRDC)
Ocean Pollution and You
You can start by reducing water pollution and runoff at home, being more mindful of your plastic consumption, or organizing a cleanup of your local waterway. (NRDC)
The fate of our seas is not only up to the government or industry. Our individual, daily actions matter, too!
© The contents in this post belongs to the Natural Resources Defense Council. #STO #NRDC #OceanPollution
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