Easily understand ocean pollution
It's difficult to talk about the environment without addressing the issue of ocean pollution. What are the different causes of this pollution? Why is it important to protect marine ecosystems and, above all, what role do we have to play? This is what we will try to understand in this new subject.
The wealth of the oceans
First of all, you should know that the seas and oceans cover 70% of our planet and represent 97% of the available water. We will differentiate between a deeper ocean, bordered by several continents, and a sea, generally smaller but where we find greater marine diversity. We often talk about the world ocean since the Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, Arctic and Antarctic are all connected. On the other hand, except for closed seas, all seas in the world are open to the oceans or connected to them by a strait. What happens in one will necessarily impact others. So here, we will talk about seas and oceans without necessarily making a distinction.
Quite simply, the oceans are a prodigious resource. They alone represent 90% of the Earth's natural habitat and are home to tens of thousands of species, most of which have yet to be discovered. They also help regulate our climate, enable the transport of resources across the planet, and provide us with oxygen and food. Today it is considered that half of the world's populations depend on fishing products and that the ocean generates more than 30 million
employment.
Faced with all this wealth, for centuries, Man has exploited and consumed as if marine resources were inexhaustible and dumped colossal quantities of waste into the oceans on a daily basis. And today they are suffocating. Like many natural resources before them, the oceans, too, have reached their limits.
Some data on ocean pollution
Ocean pollution refers to the introduction of toxic materials and harmful pollutants such as agricultural and industrial waste, chemicals, oil spills and plastic waste into ocean waters. Of all these facts, there is one constant: most of the pollution in our oceans begins on land and is caused by humans.
When it is not fishing which overexploits 30 to 40% of marine species, it is oil, nuclear or plastic pollution which undermines the good health of aquatic ecosystems. Whether floating, stranded or submerged, visible or invisible, waste is very poorly digested by the oceans and resists time even better than it does on Earth. Because no, waste does not simply disappear once it leaves our home. Nature will benefit from it much longer than us.
Every year, 8 million pieces of waste, mainly plastic, are dumped into the seas, to the point that for some time now we have been witnessing the formation of what has been designated as the 7th continent. Located in the North Pacific, between Japan and California, it is actually a floating mass composed of several thousand visible debris and plastic microparticles, extending over more than 3.5 million km². The equivalent of six times the French territory. The area has since become one of the symbols of the catastrophic impact of our human activities on the oceans. The phenomenon is no longer exotic. A plastic island made up of billions of tonnes of waste was discovered off the coast of Corsica in 2019.