Contents page 1 — How’s the water? Page 2 — so Far, the oceans as a kind of buffer to act On a page to read
Henderson Island is an uninhabited coral island in the South Pacific and is located 5,000 kilometres from the nearest mainland. It is a Unesco world heritage site, due to the once-pristine nature. Today, the ecological footprint of humans on to Henderson Island, it is obvious – the beaches of the island are covered by a lot of garbage: Up to 670 pieces of plastic per square meter have been found, scientists here in the summer of 2015. Grossed nearly 18 tonnes on an island, which is less than half as large as the island of Sylt. Currents bring the garbage over the ocean to get here.
plastic waste are among the most well-known Plagues in the ocean. The durable plastic parts are gone with the Wind, the vessels disposed of, and of rivers more; millions of tons every year into the seas, especially on the coasts of China and Southeast Asia. A big part of it is concentrated in the North Pacific. Alone there are estimated to drive on four times the area of Germany up to 80,000 tons of plastic, and the trend is rising. Especially tricky are the countless “Ghost nets” made of plastic that have been discarded by fishermen or lost under the surface are a death trap for turtles, sharks and whales. Even the North sea is full of rubbish: seabirds get tangled in the nylon cords or starve to death, while your stomach is full of plastic parts.
most of The particles are tiny, less than five millimeters in size: of micro plastic. About 2.000.000.000.000 (two trillion) to whirl around them projected in the Pacific garbage vortex. Even the most isolated regions are burdened already. Researchers have found synthetic fibers in crabs, sea cucumbers and Seefedern in the deep sea. In the ice of the Arctic, the marine biologist Ilka Peeken, Alfred Wegener Institute, has counted in Bremerhaven, set to 12,000 plastic particles per Liter. Almost all were smaller than a human hair. “Microplastics can accumulate in the food chain,” warns the scientist. And could land on animals at some point on our plates.
plastic in the sea – Only we are poisoning the ocean, then us, millions of tons of plastic land every year in the sea and harm animals and nature. As micro-particles, we breathe in him, too. An explainer video © photo: youtube.com/cheeseandjamsandwich
The oceans are not only a Repository for waste, the extraction of raw materials is detrimental to them. For the whole world-obviously the 2010 was when the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded. For three months, almost ten million litres of Oil spilled daily in the 1,500 meters depth in the Gulf of Mexico. A large part reached the surface, and soiled large parts of the South coast of the United States. Tens of thousands of seabirds died. More than 300 million litres of Oil were distributed in the deep sea, and destroyed a thousand-year-old cold-water coral reefs.
most of The problems occur, however, so obvious. Much of what humans do to the oceans, is at first glance invisible.
This article dates back to the TIME no 05/2019. Here you can read the entire issue.
This has to do with that water covers 70 percent of the earth. The average depth is 3500 meters, the Mariana trench is even eleven kilometers deep. The amount of water is so huge that it took a long time, the resources of the seas and their power to absorb waste and pollutants of all kinds, to be inexhaustible. In fact, the man is also charged to the oceans – and the part up to and beyond the limits of their natural capacity for regeneration. The prospects for the future are very encouraging. Especially the climate change, but also other human-induced problems will have their effect on the chemistry and biology of the oceans in the next decades.
The can be nutrients of all kinds, but also of CO₂, or the heat, the different greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The consequences for the environment are serious and they manifest themselves in different forms in different places. So, for example, on the Australian Great Barrier reef, the largest living structure of the earth, during the last decades, disappeared half of the world’s coral. Responsible for the global warming in the first place. Meanwhile, the coastal waters of Australia are sought regularly by heat waves, home. It was particularly bad in 2016, more than 60 percent of the reef have been damaged due to the unusually high temperatures and coral bleaching.
For all tropical reefs, climate change has a similar impact. The heat waves in the oceans increase the temperature of the warming of the sea water even a few degrees Celsius. Under such conditions, corals expel their vital sub-tenant, the so-called symbiote. And since the beginning of the 1980s, has doubled the number of extremely hot days in the world’s oceans. Heat waves that last for weeks or months are frequently associated with the climate phenomenon El Niño and global Mass bleaching cause coral reefs.
