why oceans and seas are important?
70% of our planet is covered with water and They govern the weather, clean the air, help feed the world, and provide a living for millions. They also are home to most of the life on earth, from microscopic algae to the blue whale, the largest animal on the planet.
It is also one of the most important sources of economy especially in America ; The billion-dollar American shellfish industry is the economic backbone of myriad coastal communities, from Louisiana to Maine to Maryland.
what is water pollution?
- Chemical and trash pollution:
Our ocean is being flooded with two main types of pollution: chemicals and trash.
Chemical contamination, or nutrient pollution, is concerning for health, environmental, and economic reasons. This type of pollution occurs when human activities, notably the use of fertilizer on farms, lead to the runoff of chemicals into waterways that ultimately flow into the ocean. The increased concentration of chemicals, such as nitrogen and phosphorus, in the coastal ocean promotes the growth of algal blooms, which can be toxic to wildlife and harmful to humans. The negative effects on health and the environment caused by algal blooms hurt local fishing and tourism industries.
- Noise pollution:
The ocean is far from a “silent world.” Sound waves travel farther and faster in the sea’s dark depths than they do in the air, and many marine mammals like whales and dolphins, in addition to fish and other sea creatures, rely on communication by sound to find food, mate, and navigate. But an increasing barrage of human-generated ocean noise pollution is altering the underwater acoustic landscape, harming—and even killing—marine species worldwide.
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Offshore drilling
In addition to noise pollution, the oil and gas industry’s routine operations emit toxic by-products, release high levels of greenhouse gases, and lead to thousands of spills in U.S. waters annually. That oil can linger for decades and do irreversible damage to delicate marine ecosystems.
what effects does it have?
- The majority of the garbage that enters the ocean each year is plastic—and here to stay. That’s because unlike other trash, the single-use grocery bags, water bottles, drinking straws, and yogurt containers, among eight million metric tons of the plastic items we toss (instead of recycle), won’t biodegrade.Fish become tangled and injured in the plastic wastes, and some animals mistake items like plastic bags for food and eat them.
- Where does all this trash comes from? While some is dumped directly into the seas, an estimated 80 percent of marine litter
makes its way there gradually from land-based sources―including those far inland―via storm drains, sewers, and other routes. (An excellent reason why we should all reduce plastic pollution, no matter where we live.) Oil from boats, airplanes, cars, trucks, and even lawn mowers is also swimming in ocean waters. Chemical discharges from factories, raw sewage overflow from water treatment systems, and stormwater and agricultural runoff add other forms of marine-poisoning pollutants to the toxic brew. - some small organisms like planktons eat microplastics and
and absorb the chemicals from the plastic into their tissues.When small organisms that consume microplastics are eaten by larger animals, the toxic chemicals then become part of their tissues. In this way, the microplastic pollution migrates up the food chain, eventually becoming part of the food that humans eat. Micro plastic.air pollution - oceans become acidity , how? When we burn fossil fuels, we don’t pollute just the air but the
oceans, too. Indeed, today’s seas absorb as much as a quarter of all man-made carbon emissions, which changes the pH of surface waters and leads to acidification. This problem is rapidly worsening—oceans are now acidifying faster than they have in some 300 million years. It’s estimated that by the end of this century, if we keep pace with our current emissions practices, the surface waters of the ocean could be nearly 150 percent more acidic than they are now. - Noise pollution can disrupt foraging, mating, and other
vital behaviors of endangered whales (and may ultimately push some, such as the North Atlantic right whale, to extinction) - The blasts in the sea by marine ships lead some commercial fish species to abandon their habitat—a direct hit on coastal economies dependent on catch rates; they also injure and kill marine invertebrates, including scallops, crabs, and squid.
