Global News - August 2008
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Report warns that all complex marine life is facing extinction
Thu 14 August 2008 14:00 UK — Marine Wildlife
A new report has warned that human activities could end up driving most of the species living in the world's oceans to extinction.
In an article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, US oceanographer Jeremy Jackson suggested that the cumulative impact of habitat destruction, overfishing, ocean warming, increased acidification and massive nutrient runoff could end up wiping complex life from the seas completely.
What's more, the expert argued that there was already evidence that areas that once supported intricate marine food webs have now been altered so that only microbes, toxic algal blooms and jellyfish survive.
Professor Jackson has dubbed this phenomenon "the rise of slime". He explained: "The purpose of … the paper is to make clear just how dire the situation is and how rapidly things are getting worse.
"It's a lot like the issue of climate change that we had ignored for so long. If anything, the situation in the oceans could be worse because we are so close to the precipice in many ways."
"All of the different kinds of data and methods of analysis point in the same direction of drastic and increasingly rapid degradation of marine ecosystems."
Recently, the IUCN reported that nearly a quarter of cetacean species are considered threatened at the moment.
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