The death of the oceans?
I've seen some other pieces that address one or two of these, but this is the first popular piece to put more of the puzzle together. The End of the Line was really worth seeing on overfishing, but doesn't really touch anything else.
The documentary is also of interest as it introduces the Census of Marine Life, a massive ten year international research project to establish a baseline against which future measurements can be made. More information on the census here, which gives some sense of the size of this project:
"The Census cost $650 million, and involved 2,700 scientists from more than 80 nations and territories working at 670 institutions. They mounted more than 540 expeditions, comprising about 9,000 days at sea, where they studied organisms from the surface all the way down to more than six miles down and in environments that ranged from freezing cold to above the boiling point of water (at the great pressures at the bottom of the sea, water can become superheated near volcanic vents) and ultimately produced about 2,600 scientific papers.
"What was in those papers? Glad you asked: the scientists collectively made 30 million observations of some 120,000 species, found more than 6,000 new ones, tracked the migratory patterns of thousands, and extrapolated from what they saw that the 250,000 known marine species (excluding microbes) are probably only a quarter of what's really out there. If you want to talk microbes, they say, there may be as many as a billion different kinds in the world's oceans."
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Overfishing in Iceland.
ScienceDaily: Human impact on the deep sea.
Independent: Half the world's seabirds are in decline.
DD: Noise pollution may have killed thousands of dolphins off Peru.
The Conversation: Marine life sandwiched by rising CO2. Raises the issue of hypoxia (loss of oxygen) in the oceans, which is associated not only with agricultural run-off creating dead zones, but also with rising CO2 (I wasn't previously aware of this latter effect).
Also reports on some recent research suggesting greater robustness amongst corals to pH changes, which is good news.
Here's a whole very useful website about plastic pollution called 5 Gyres.
One in three albatross chicks, hatched in the middle of the Pacific 5,000 km from either the US or Japan, die from being fed too much plastic waste. Over 100 million tonnes of plastic are dumped each year and about six million tonnes finds its way into the oceans. That is something like eight million pieces of litter entering the world's waterways and oceans each day, and results in there being over 119,000 items floating on every square kilometre of ocean (many of them tiny enough to be invisible to the eye, but very tempting for fish and birds).
Stephen Leahy: Fatal addiction to plastic. (Multiple relevant posts here)
AP: Noise pollution harming wales, according to new study.
Note what was not included in possible responses: reduce shipping traffic through a reduction in consumption levels.
Guardian: Whales suffering from military sonar noise pollution. Whales fleeing military sonar has been linked to mass strandings.
ABC: The coming crisis for the oceans. A lecture by Callum Roberts, summarising a new book of that title. Key quote: "the world’s oceans have changed more in the past thirty years than during the whole of human history." And probably for a very long time before that. He says we need to go back 55 million years for similar scale changes and back 65 million years for anything like the same pace.
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