Coral reef ecologist Jeremy Jackson gave a talk at TED that lays out the evidence that the oceans are slipping away from us — the compounding factors of intensive overfishing, chemical and material (think plastic) pollution, invasive species and global warming are adding up to more dead zones, more plastic continents, more devastated underwater landscapes, and more lost species.

From MNN

In the past several years I have gradually learned of the dangers to the oceans from human activity.  The biggest problem is how fast the changes are  occurring.  There is a huge amount of pollution we can see — literally, garbage — and a huge amount we cannot see.   Dead zones without oxygen, where nothing can live, are growing. These are not caused by natural effects, these things are caused by humans.  We need the ocean to support all life on earth.  People who say that the oceans are so vast, we can’t possibly harm them, are uninformed.  Oceans have definitely been negatively affected by people on a huge scale to the point where they are in serious danger,  and there is no end in sight.  Do we really think we can just keep manufacturing plastic and generating garbage and toxins and dump it all  into the ocean, into infinity?  This is what we’ve been doing.  Worse, our CO2 emissions are making the oceans more of an acid bath than a place to take a bath, or fish.   The ocean acidification is actually beginning to frighten ocean research scientists, it’s so bad.  This can’t keep happening.

In June, during the 2nd or 3rd wave of anger and disgust over the BP oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, the journal Science came out with an extensive report on the oceans.  You can only read it here with a subscription, but some points of it are below.  The ongoing Gulf of Mexico oil spill is just one more human activity adding to the inevitable collapse of the oceans unless we do something to change very quickly.

I really don’t think our politicians understand what is at stake here.  In June, 2010, the journal Science reported that ocean acidification is unprecedented.  The current condition of the oceans is unprecedented.  From Science:

By spewing carbon dioxide from smokestacks and tailpipes at a gigatons-per-year pace, humans are lowering the pH of the world ocean. The geochemical disruption will reverberate for tens of thousands of years. It’s less clear how marine life will fare. With nothing in the geologic record as severe as the ongoing plunge in ocean pH, paleontologists can’t say for sure how organisms that build carbonate shells or skeletons will react. In the laboratory, corals always do poorly. The lab responses of other organisms are mixed. In the field, researchers see signs that coral growth does slow, oyster larvae suffer, and plankton with calcareous skeletons lose mass.

In seawater of the pH that may prevail [...]