Rising sea levels pose a far bigger eco threat than
previously thought. This week's climate change conference in Copenhagen will
sound an alarm over new floodings - enough to swamp Bangladesh, Florida, the
Norfolk Broads and the Thames estuary.
Washington
- Seven hundred miles west of Seattle in the Pacific at Ocean Station Papa, a
first-of-its-kind buoy is anchored to monitor a looming environmental
catastrophe.
For the first time, scientists have compiled a comprehensive map of the
oceans showing the extent to which they have been damaged by man. The map
integrates 17 different kinds of human activity - such as nitrogen fertilisers
being washed into the sea from farming - and 20 types of ocean ecosystem, from
coral reefs to mangrove forests, to study which parts of the marine environment
have suffered most. The scientists found more than 40 per cent of the oceans
bear the scars of serious environmental degradation and that only a small
percentage have remained as pristine regions free of human influence.
Video images scanned from the seafloor revealed a boneyard of crab
skeletons, dead fish and other marine life smothered under a white mat of
bacteria. At times, the camera's unblinking eye revealed nothing at all - a
barren undersea desert in waters renowned for their bounty of Dungeness crabs
and fat rockfish.
