Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle

shared by Jan Wyllie on 11 Sep 11 - No Cached

Coral reefs are on course to become the first ecosystem that human activity will eliminate entirely from the Earth, a leading United Nations scientist claims. He says this event will occur before the end of the present century,
...

Cancel
"a new first for mankind – the 'extinction' of an entire ecosystem"
...

Cancel
The predicted decline is mainly down to climate change and ocean acidification, though local activities such as overfishing, pollution and coastal development have also harmed the reefs. The book, Our Dying Planet, published by University of California Press, contains further alarming predictions, such as the prospect that "we risk having no reefs that resemble those of today in as little as 30 or 40 more years"
...

Cancel
...3 more annotations...
Coral reefs are important for the immense biodiversity of their ecosystems. They contain a quarter of all marine species, despite covering only 0.1 per cent of the world's oceans by area, and are more diverse even than the rainforests in terms of diversity per acre, or types of different phyla present
...

Cancel
And reef disappearance has tended to precede wider mass extinction events, offering an ominous "canary in the environmental coal mine" for the present day,
...

Cancel
"But the overall message we agree with. People are not taking on board the sheer speed of the changes we're seeing."
...

Cancel