- The world’s oceans have less oxygen today than they did up to, say, 1950 or 1960, according to a new study.
- The report is the work of 67 scientists from 17 countries around the world.
- The IUCN, the global authority on the status of the natural world and the measures needed to safeguard it, released the study at the United Nations Climate Change Conference currently underway in Madrid.
- In many parts of the world, including along the western coast of the United States, fish have been dying en masse — a clear illustration of the ways in which deoxygenation is choking the oceans.
- As oceans lose oxygen, they become more acidic, a phenomenon that has resulted in some places in shellfish having their shells degraded or dissolved — the so called “osteoporosis of the sea”.
- The primary causes of deoxygenation are:
- Eutrophication (increased nutrient run-off from land and sewage pollution).
- Nitrogen deposition from burning of fossil fuels.
- Widespread impacts from ocean warming.
- The loss of oxygen from world’s ocean is increasingly threatening fish species and disrupting ecosystems.
- Deoxygenation is starting to alter the balance of marine life , favouring low-oxygen tolerant species (e.g. microbes, jellyfish and some squid) at the expense of low-oxygen sensitive ones (many marine species, including most fish).
- Some of the ocean’s most productive biomes – which support one fifth of the world’s wild marine fish harvest – are formed by ocean currents carrying nutrient-rich but oxygen-poor water to coasts that line the eastern edges of the world’s ocean basins.
- Raise our ambitions to tackle climate change
- Commit to immediate and substantial emission cuts.
- The world’s oceans are currently undergoing a dangerous transformation resulting into suffocating dead zones, in this context discuss the causes and effects of Oceanic dead zones on Marine ecosystem.
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