Hi and good day students!
Before moving on to our next online lesson, I want you all to look at these two pictures below. WHICH KIND OF OCEAN DO WISH TO GO TO? The one depicted in the first picture or the second picture?
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| VERSUS |
I am pretty sure that everyone prefers going to a beautiful and uncontaminated ocean like in the first picture, and nobody would want to enjoy going to a contaminated ocean like in the second picture! Do you know that the contamination is done by us, HUMANS?
Below is a picture of proof to show how contamination affects animals and the nature as a whole :
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| A baby albatross has died from eating plastics for it had mistaken trash and plastics floating on the sea as food. This is one of the effects of human-made contamination |
In order to enlighten you all with this issue, let's read the article below and try to comprehend it.
The ten (10) words in bold are vocabularies which might hinder your thorough understanding of this article IF you do not understand any of them. So, your first task is, while you are reading the article below, please refer the definitions of the words in any of these suggested online dictionaries below:
In the article below, there is also a video attached in order to make you all better understand about the subject matter. Do enjoy your reading (and watching) while increasing your awareness, students!
Effects of Pollution by Anup Shah
Pollution (land and marine) are long known to have negative impacts on wildlife and the environment.
From industrial and agricultural run-offs to household waste and more can end up far from the source, causing problems for people and the environment, even as far as the arctic, as the video from WWF notes.
The WWF also says over 80% of marine pollution comes from land-based activities and that “a staggering amount of waste, much of which has only existed for the past 50 years or so, enters the oceans each year.”
The WWF also says over 80% of marine pollution comes from land-based activities and that “a staggering amount of waste, much of which has only existed for the past 50 years or so, enters the oceans each year.”
Examples of waste produced on land ending up in the oceans that the WWF lists include:
- Oil
- Fertilizer
- Solid garbage
- Sewage disposal
- Toxic man-made chemicals
The WWF also notes that more oil pollution comes from land than from oil spills, while fertilizer runoff contributes to various oceanic dead zones around the world. The solid garbage includes plastic bags, bottles, packaging, etc. Sewage disposal is often untreated and toxic chemicals contaminate almost every marine organism, from the tiniest to the largest.
Inter Press Service adds that military debris also threaten coral ecosystems, reefs, fish and marine wildlife:
In the North Pacific Ocean, is a great gyre (a great ocean current) of marine litter known as The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, formed as a result of marine pollution gathered by ocean currents drawing in garbage from far away places such as Japan and North America. Some types of plastics and other garbage from this gyre has ended up in the stomachs of marine animals and birds, including sea turtles and albatross birds.“The U.S. Army dumped over 8,000 tonnes of chemical weapons off Hawaii,” said Paul Walker, director of Global Green, at the recently concluded Fifth U.N. International Marine Debris Clearance conference in Hawaii. Around 300,000 tonnes of chemical warfare agents were dumped in oceans from 1946 to 1965. Upwards of 400,000 gas filled-bombs and rockets float in U.S. waters. 40,000 tonnes of Conventional Weapons (CW) are in the Baltic Sea. 21,000 tonnes of CW agents float in Australian waters, and more than 6,600 tonnes off the coast of Japan.
— Malini Shankar, Environment: Military Debris Threaten Oceans, Inter Press Service, April 14, 2011
Greenpeace says that at least 267 different species are known to have suffered from entanglement or ingestion of marine debris including seabirds, turtles, seals, sea lions, whales and fish. Some of these species are found in the North Pacific Gyre.
The UNEP (United Nations Environment Programme) also notes that marine litter poses a growing threat to marine and coastal development and that “most marine litter consists of material that degrades slowly, if at all, so a continuous input of large quantities of these items results in a gradual build-up in the marine and coastal environment.”
Source : http://www.globalissues.org/print/article/177
Finished reading? Keep yourselves updated with your next task for this article!
Finished reading? Keep yourselves updated with your next task for this article!
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