What can one person do to help conserve our beautiful planet Earth? I sit here and ponder that, feeling my only option is to worry. Today's snippet of awareness is my attempt to at least make others aware of what's happening to Earth's oceans.....
- According to National Geographic, 5.25 trillion plastic items already reside in our oceans. To put this in perspective, there are just over 8 billion humans on Planet Earth now. It takes 1,000 billion to equal 1 trillion. I have to stop and wrap my brain about the gravity of these numbers.
- By 2050, the plastic in the ocean will outweigh the fish. Pollution is rapidly changing our world's oceans. Conservation International reports that humanity dumps 8 million metric tons (metric ton: 2,205 lbs) of plastic into them every year. In less than 30 years, there will be more tons of plastic in the ocean than there are fish.
- Plastic alone is estimated to kill 100,000 marine animals every year. This is due to entanglement in fishing nets and even plastic bags. This includes less thought-about items, such as straws and plastic wrap.
- Ocean dead zones are places in which oxygen levels are so low that life forms cannot survive. Although dead zones can occur naturally, human activity (mostly nutrient pollution) has resulted in more areas suffering from these conditions. What is nutrient pollution? It's when too many nutrients, mainly nitrogen and phosphorus, are added to bodies of water and act like fertilizer. Nutrients can run off of land where agriculture, lawn and garden fertilizers are used.
- Our Earth, with a radius of 3,925 miles, could be covered as many as 400 times with the plastic found within the ocean.
- No country is exempt from ocean pollution. To make things worse, many are offloading their trash to others, meaning the amount of garbage is not only increasing but being transported across the globe.
- The U.S. allows cruise ships to dump their treated sewage waste into the ocean if they are within 3-1/2 miles from shore. Beyond that point, there are no restrictions for dumping untreated, raw sewage in U.S. ocean waters. More than a billion gallons of sewage are dumped into the ocean annually. This sewage is not only full of human waste, but also chemicals, pharmaceuticals, bacteria, viruses, heavy metals and hazardous waste. Many cruise ships lack the sewage treatment facilities to adequately filter out toxins.
- The Great Pacific Garbage Patch covers an area twice the size of Texas. To formulate the area, a team of scientists conducted the most elaborate sampling method ever coordinated.
- Here is a link to a short YT video on this massive problem facing humanity. https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=w7jTcao-Jw0
