A
team of scientists, in a groundbreaking analysis of data from hundreds
of sources, has concluded that humans are on the verge of causing
unprecedented damage to the oceans and the animals living in them.
“We
may be sitting on a precipice of a major extinction event,” said
Douglas J. McCauley, an ecologist at the University of California, Santa
Barbara, and an author of the new research, which was published on Thursday in the journal Science.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/347/6219/1255641
But
there is still time to avert catastrophe, Dr. McCauley and his
colleagues also found. Compared with the continents, the oceans are
mostly intact, still wild enough to bounce back to ecological health.
“We’re
lucky in many ways,” said Malin L. Pinsky, a marine biologist at
Rutgers University and another author of the new report. “The impacts
are accelerating, but they’re not so bad we can’t reverse them.”
