Ocean Pollution and Its Impact on Coral Reefs

Humans now dominate most of the earth's ecosystems, both land and water. Between one-third and one-half of the land surface has been modified by human activity and the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere has increased by nearly 30 percent since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution (Vitousek et al., 1997). Species have been driven to extinction, particularly birds. At the present, scientists are even beginning to believe that human action might extinguish some marine species that spend their whole lives in the ocean (Malakoff, 1997). Multiple assaults on the ocean affect everything from fish to coral reefs. The intention in this analysis is to explore how ocean pollution affects coral reefs and potential ways to provide protection or restoration.

Coral reefs are actually a living organism, beginning their evolutionary process approximately 200 million to 400 million years ago. They cover approximately 231,660 square miles of the ocean. Coral reefs are colonies of small animals, called polyps, attached to the skeletons of earlier polyps. These polyps are akin to anemones, with columnar bodies surrounded by tentacles. They live in a calcium-based cup which develops from their own secretions. They also have their own symbiont algae which help them process nutrients. Essentially, coral reefs are slow-growing colonies which create vast ecosystems that are thousands of yea

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ation rate and reef-building (Pennisi, 1998). Ocean pollution itself has many different kinds of impact on the coral reefs, as there are many different kinds of pollution. For example, pollution in the form of fertilizer leads to increased algae bloom, which can replace coral reefs. Pollution in the form of heavy metal and various forms of industrial waste can simply poison both the reefs and the fish that colonize them. The estimate is that in 1989 more than 16 trillion gallons of sewage and industrial waste were dumped into rivers and coastal waters, with much of that dumped in rivers and other waterways eventually reaching the ocean. As Hogshire (1990) noted, that does not count the garbage and trash from beachwalkers, boaters, oil spills, oil platforms, and pipeline failures, nor the vast quantities of radioactive waste that were dumped into the ocean between 1946 and 1970, including at least 89,472 drums of radioactive waste that are still unaccounted for. It is important to understand that until very recently nations and people have thought of the ocean as a very good place to dump wastes, anything that they did not know what to do with, since it was a very large place and the waste was immediately lost from sight. Ever

Category: Science - O