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AN international panel of experts warned last night that fish and other marine species are in danger of entering a phase of extinction unseen in human history.
The preliminary report arises from a ‘State of the Oceans’ workshop co-hosted by the International Union For the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the first ever to consider the cumulative impact of all pressures on the oceans. Considering the latest research across all areas of marine science, the workshop examined the combined effects of pollution, acidification, ocean warming, over-fishing and hypoxia (deoxygenation).
The scientific panel concluded that the combination of stresses on the ocean is creating the conditions associated with every previous major extinction of species in Earth’s history. And the speed and rate of degeneration in the ocean is far greater than anyone has predicted.The panel found that many of the negative impacts previously identified are greater than the worst predictions. As a result, although difficult to assess, the first steps to globally significant extinction may have begun with a rise in the extinction threat to marine species such as reef-forming corals.
The panel was convened by IPSO or the International Programme for the State of the Oceans and brought together by experts from different disciplines. The report will formally be released later this week, but the findings have already been described as "shocking" by Alex Rogers, IPSO's scientific director from Oxford University. The implications are far worse than he or anyone had realised, he added. Changes were happening at a pace which no-one had expected to see for hundreds of years.
These "accelerated" changes include melting of Arctic sea ice and the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, sea level rise, and release of methane trapped in the sea bed.
The facts highlighted by the panel included:- The levels of carbon being absorbed by the ocean are already far greater now than at the time of the last mass extinction of marine species, some 55 million years ago, when up to 50% of some groups of deep sea animals were wiped out.
• Overfishing has reduced some commercial fish stocks by more than 90 per cent
• New science also suggests that pollutants including flame retardant chemicals and synthetic musks found in detergents are being traced in the Polar Seas, and that these chemicals can be absorbed by tiny plastic particles in the ocean which are in turn eaten by marine creatures.
The report's authors include Alex Rogers, a Professor of Conservation Biology at the Department of Zoology, University of Oxford and a Fellow of Somerville College and Professor Dan Laffoley, a key figure at the global scale on marine conservation, and widely recognized for his leadership on Marine Protected Areas and innovative conservation approaches.
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