One Ocean, Many Worlds of Life - Convention on Biological Diversity

The
Human Impact
So vast is the global ocean that one scientist was moved to observe, approximately
50 years ago, that it “may be rash to put any limit on the mischief <strong>of</strong>
which man is capable, but it would seem that those 100 and more million
cubic miles <strong>of</strong> water... is the great matrix that man can hardly sully and
cannot appreciably despoil.”
But the ocean, while vast, is not infinite
As scientist Jim Lovelock has observed, “although the weight <strong>of</strong> the oceans
is 250 times that <strong>of</strong> the atmosphere, it is only one part in 4,000 <strong>of</strong> the weight
<strong>of</strong> the Earth.” If the Earth were a globe 30 centimetres in diameter, Lovelock
noted, the average depth <strong>of</strong> the ocean would be no more than the thickness
<strong>of</strong> a piece <strong>of</strong> paper, and even the deepest ocean trench would be a dent <strong>of</strong> a
third <strong>of</strong> a millimetre.
Accordingly, nor is it immune to human influence
Commercial whaling provided oil for a huge range <strong>of</strong> uses, from lighting and
heating to soap and even nitro-glycerine; at its peak, the riches to be gained
from the industry were so immense that European powers would literally do
battle over the rights to whaling grounds. But it came at a tremendous cost to
the whales themselves: gray whales are no longer found in the Atlantic and are
close to disappearing from the western Pacific; in the Atlantic Arctic, bowhead
whales number in the hundreds at most. In the Southern Hemisphere, where
once there were perhaps 200,000 blue whales, there are now maybe 1,000.
38 Marine BiOdiversity
<strong>Life</strong>size/Thinkstock/
Stephen Schauer