Ocean
Biodiversity Being Destroyed
Author:
Tanya Berry
Contact: tanberry@pdx.edu
The world’s oceans are some of
the greatest biodiversity on the planet.
Scientists are still discovering new plant and animal life. There is a great threat to this biodiversity. It is caused by human activity and is called
hypoxia or also known as dead zones.
Hypoxia is a depletion of oxygen
from water which no living plant or animal can survive. Majority of this is from fertilizers that
farmers use on crops such as nitrate and phosphate. These nutrients help plants grow, but when it
runs off into the rivers then ocean, it fertilizes oceanic plants which create
an over growth known as plankton blooms.
These plants over produce and eventually die. This increased algae begins to decompose
which depletes the oxygen.
These areas can be changed,
but it is going to take time to reverse.
Near our Mississippi river, scientists have been working with farmers to
find other solutions to effectively and efficiently use nutrients in the
soil. Agriculture is the biggest
contributor to this problem, but scientists also feel that through agriculture
we can reverse and prevent this in the future from finding environmentally safe
fertilizers to possibly a filtering system for the rivers.
There is a way this can be fixed, but we need to be aware of what we are
putting in our soils and be proactive.
References:
Chesapeake
Bay Foundation
Dallas
News
Wikipedia
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
The
Ohio State University
Paul
R. Pinet, Invitation to Oceanography 6th
Edition, Jones & Bartlett Learning, 2011
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