At a moment in time where the latest space race has rekindled interest in space exploration and travel, most people are still taking for granted what we have so close to us. The ocean is a vast and largely unexplored part of the Earth, considering that it covers 71 percent of the Earth’s surface. So why isn’t there a “new dive into the ocean” in a similar way that there has been newly sparked interest in outer space?
We take the ocean for granted. “Scientific assessments of the oceans’ health are dogged by uncertainty: It’s much harder for researchers to judge the well-being of a species living underwater, over thousands of miles, than to track the health of a species on land,” Carl Zimmer said in an article for the New York Times, which reported on an increase in the damage to ocean wildlife that humans are responsible for. Clearly, we don’t see it as important because of the inaccessibility of the deepest depths of the ocean. The problem is that most people don’t see that the distance to the bottom of the ocean is much closer than to galaxies outside of our own, or even to the next planet over.
There is so much that the ocean has to offer that we have not truly gotten to explore. With the pollution that we are causing, we are on the path toward ruining things that we haven’t even had the chance to learn about. “There are clear signs already that humans are harming the oceans to a remarkable degree, the scientists found. Some ocean species are certainly overharvested, but even greater damage results from large-scale habitat loss, which is likely to accelerate as technology advances the human footprint, the scientists reported,” Zimmer said. It is unfortunate that oceanic importance is taking a back seat when not only does the ocean provide new findings for biology, but also insights into shipwrecks and lost cities, as well as geographical changes of the Earth.
However, there are places in which we can bridge the gap between habits that benefit us and the ocean. “While it might seem like pollution, throwing the subway cars into the sea is actually part of an effort to create an artificial reef to help foster sea life and tourism,” Allison Vingiano reported for Buzzfeed News. New York City subway cars are being stripped of their insides and being dumped along coastlines to create artificial reefs. While this may not be the best situation, it could be beneficial. At the same time, we don’t really know the long-term effects these changes might have.
The continual exploration of the Earth’s oceans is incredibly important. Just recently, “The prehistoric forest lay undiscovered until it was exposed by the extreme storms along the east of England coast in December 2013,” BBC reported, showing that there are places underwater that are of significant scientific importance yet haven’t been discovered until into the 21st century. We should be taking advantage of the huge technological advances of our time period to discover these things before we accidentally destroy them.
Reach the columnist at Kayla.Chan@asu.edu or follow @KaylaRC2014 on Twitter.
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Editor’s note: The opinions presented in this column are the author’s and do not imply any endorsement from The State Press or its editors.
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