Eksperterne troede det ikke muligt: Forandringer, de mente ville tage århundreder, kommer nu i ekspresfart
The oceans are in a worse state than previously suspected, according to an expert panel of scientists, BBC online writes Monday.
In a new report, they warn that ocean life is “at high risk of entering a phase of extinction of marine species unprecedented in human history”.
They conclude that issues such as over-fishing, pollution and climate change are acting together in ways that have not previously been recognised. The impacts, they say, are already affecting humanity.
The panel was convened by the International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO), and brought together experts from different disciplines, including coral reef ecologists, toxicologists, and fisheries scientists.
– The findings are shocking, said Alex Rogers, IPSO’s scientific director and professor of conservation biology at Oxford University.
– We have ended up with a picture showing that almost right across the board we are seeing changes that are happening faster than we had thought, or in ways that we did not expect to see for hundreds of years, Dr Rogers stated.
– If you look at almost everything, whether it is fisheries in temperate zones or coral reefs or Arctic sea ice, all of this is undergoing changes, but at a much faster rate than we had thought, said Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, a coral specialist from the University of Queensland in Australia.
But more worrying than this, the team noted, are the ways in which different issues act synergistically to increase threats to marine life. Some pollutants, for example, stick to the surfaces of tiny plastic particles that are now found in the ocean bed. This increases the amounts of these pollutants that are consumed by bottom-feeding fish.
In a wider sense, ocean acidification (forsuring), warming, local pollution and overfishing are acting together to increase the threat to coral reefs – so much so that three-quarters of the world’s reefs are at risk of severe decline.
Life on Earth has gone through five “mass extinction events” caused by events such as asteroid impacts; and it is often said that humanity’s combined impact is causing a sixth such event.
The IPSO report concludes that it is too early to say definitively. But the trends are such that it is likely to happen, they say – and far faster than any of the previous five, BBC notes.
