The seas have long sustained human life, but a new UC Santa Barbara study shows that rising climate and human pressures are pushing the oceans toward a dangerous threshold.
The seas have long sustained human life, but a new UC Santa Barbara study shows that rising climate and human pressures are pushing the oceans toward a dangerous threshold.
Vast and powerful, the oceans can seem limitless in their abundance and impervious to disturbances. For millennia, humans have supported their lives, livelihoods and lifestyles with the ocean, relying on its diverse ecosystems for food and material, but also for recreation, business, wellness and tourism.
Yet the future of our oceans is worrying, according to researchers at UCSB’s National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS).
“Our cumulative impact on the oceans, which is already substantial, is going to double by 2050 — in just 25 years,” said marine ecologist and NCEAS director Ben Halpern, who led the effort to forecast the future state of marine environments as they bow under the combined pressures of human activities, which include ocean warming, fisheries biomass loss, sea level rise, acidification and nutrient pollution, among other impacts. “It’s sobering. And it’s unexpected, not because impacts will be increasing — that is not surprising — but because they will be increasing so much, so fast.”
Read More: University of California - Santa Barbara
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