== Problems Sieging Our Ocean Are Spiraling Out Of Control ==
By Sarah Azhar
He who has health has hope and He who has hope has everything – Thomas Carlyle. Similarly, the country that has Ocean has hope and who has hope has everything. We know that there is no life on earth without water. Ocean absorbs 50 times more CO2 and produces over half of the world's oxygen but our oceans and seas are in perils and have a lot of threats. We, Homo sapiens, are over-utilizing resources and indirectly losing our world’s treasure. Globe is facing severe challenges regarding the ocean and a thumbnail of the main ones is presented below.
Climate change, Unsustainable aquaculture, extreme oil drilling, increasing mercury pollution, deep mining, often and frequent oil spills, Marine Debris, destruction of habitat, Ocean acidification & Coral Bleaching are some threats to our oceans. Unsustainable aquaculture includes taking too many wild fish out of the ocean to feed farmed fish. Moreover, Augment in the production of Plastic as every year 6.4 million tons of plastic are dumped into the ocean and we have produced more plastic in the last decade than we did in the whole century. There is an estimated 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic debris in the ocean and of that 269,000 tons float on the surface. 100,000 marine creatures die every year from plastic entanglement. nevertheless, according to research “Shoppers worldwide use approximately 500,000,000,000 single-use plastic bags annually and only 1 in 5 plastic water bottles are recycled”.
At least 2/3 of the world’s fish stocks are suffering from plastic ingestion. It happens because plastic breakdowns into tinier pieces though they never fully degrade and those tiny pieces enter the food chain and release chemicals into the fish that eat them.
One other threat to our Ocean is well known The Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP), it’s a collection of Marine debris in the north Pacific Ocean also known as Pacific trash vortex. The shocking fact is that the warm water from the South Pacific meets up with the cold water from the Arctic and this moves garbage back and forth between the Western Garbage Patch, located near Japan, to the Eastern Garbage Patch (located between Hawaii and California). 80% of the debris of GPGP comes from land-based activities in North America and Asia. It takes 6 years to reach the trash from North America to GPGP and takes 1 year from Japan to other Asian countries and other 20% comes from Boaters, Large Cargo ships and Offshore oilrigs. Most of this debris is fishing nets which is about 705,000 tons. Since GPGP is so far from any country’s coastline, no nation will take responsibility to fund and even contribute in the Clean-up effort.
Here’s a fact that the trash of any country until it is in the countries’ geographical area it will remain inside the country but once it enters the ocean, Global currents distribute it around the world.
Another threat for our ocean is that large number of World’s animal and plants are at the risk of extinction but contrary to the situation of debris we still have alternatives to safe endangered species in the form of Mangroves. They provide essential habitat for thousands of species and also stabilize shorelines, prevent erosion and protect land from waves and storms. But notwithstanding mangroves covers only 0.5% of earth’s coastal area and Pakistan has 0.6 million hectares of mangroves ecosystem.
Thus, the threats ocean is facing is augmenting year by year and even day by day and despite of taking several actions, a little result is coming to the fore because we’ve crossed the bridge and can’t go back.