Saving our Planet
Oceans - United Nations Sustainable Development
Campaign | Oceana
Pollution — from oil spills, coal plants and other sources — can negatively impact the health of the oceans and both the creatures and people who depend on them. Oceana is working to stop ocean pollution from all of these sources in order to protect marine biodiversity and abundance. The vast oceans act as a tremendous carbon sink, absorbing about one-third of carbon dioxide emissions. Acidification is already leading to the degradation of coral reef habitats and negatively impacting some commercially important fisheries, like shellfish. The ever-increasing amount of livestock, raised to supply the skyrocketing demand for meat, is also contributing to climate change. Offshore drilling increases the risk of toxic exposure from oil contamination to wildlife and coastal communities, and contributes to economic losses and climate change.
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Two guys from Australia invented a trash bin for the ocean
Pools have filters so why not the ocean? It’s a question many ocean lovers have asked (myself included) but two Australians pondered this and took it further by inventing a filter for harbors around the world. Andrew Turton and Pete Ceglinski, two avid surfers, quit their jobs to create a “seabin” that collects trash, oil, fuel and detergents. The fact that the “seabin” collects oil and detergents succeeds in eliminating all the things the world doesn’t want in the sea and which are extremely hard to filter out once in the ocean. The two inventors also started the Seabin Project with two objectives in mind. To make this story even more epic check out 0:20 where Pete says he “was a product designer in another life and it was [his] job to make plastic products.” This insight and mission to protect the oceans shares is incredible. Imagine if every harbor, boat owner, and floating buoy had a “seabin” to collect floating trash and oil pollutants.
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Great Barrier Reef coral bleaching at 95 per cent in northern section, aerial survey reveals - 28/03/2016
Great Barrier Reef coral bleaching at 95 per cent in northern section, aerial survey reveals Australian Broadcasting Corporation Broadcast: 28/03/2016 Reporter: Peter McCutcheon An aerial survey of the northern Great Barrier Reef has shown that 95 per cent of the northern reefs are now severely bleached — far worse than previously thought. Transcript LEIGH SALES, PRESENTER: Exclusive footage of the Great Barrier Reef shows what could be the most severe and extensive coral bleaching on record. A leading coral researcher has just returned from a four-day aerial survey of reefs off Australia's far north coast, and of the 520 reefs his team flew over, all but four were damaged. The extreme bleaching event is likely to kill some of the world's most pristine coral, as Peter McCutcheon reports. TERRY HUGHES, JAMES COOK UNIVERSITY: This will change the Great Barrier Reef forever. GREG HUNT, ENVIRONMENT MINISTER (March 20): There's good and bad news. JUSTIN MARSHALL, UNI. NEAL CANTIN, AUST.
Young Fish Return to "Home Reefs" to Settle Down
May 4, 2007 After spending weeks adrift in the ocean as tiny larvae, juvenile coral reef fish often return to their "home reef" to settle down, researchers say. The strong homing behavior shown by reef-dwelling butterflyfish in the waters near Papua New Guinea came as a surprise to scientists, and it may have important implications for the design of marine reserves. Researchers and fisheries managers have long sought better information on how very young fish disperse in the ocean. Tracking the fate of tiny larvae has been extremely difficult, since the fish are too small for even the smallest electronic tags. So a team led by Glenn Almany of Australia's James Cook University used a new method for chemically "tagging" fish while still in the egg stage inside their mothers' bodies. Later recovery of the tagged juveniles showed that as the fish matured, they returned to their place of birth. The team's report appears in this week's edition of the journal Science. Parental Involvement
Great Barrier Reef crisis: Time to address coral catastrophe
There is no one who would wish for a cyclone, but the monster storm that ravaged Fiji this year may well have spared Australia's Great Barrier Reef from catastrophe. Such is the delicate balance in the ecosystem, in the days after Tropical Cyclone Winston struck Fiji in February, a tropical deluge subsequently swept across Queensland. The rains lowered ocean temperatures at the reef, likely saving southern corals from widespread bleaching. But the vagaries of nature offer small comfort: the Great Barrier Reef is under incredible stress, and this is compounded by a Coalition government that has willfully obstructed attempts to recognise the scale of the problem. More than a third of the coral in the central and northern regions of the reef has died this year, a casualty of an El Nino-driven spike in water temperature exacerbated by global warming. Scientists describe the damage as a "huge wake-up call," but one that should hardly be required.
Just some examples...
