The Death of the Oceans
One gets the feeling that the decision to frame the title The Death of the Oceans? as a question may have been taken at the last minute in order to discourage immediate despair on the part of the viewer.
If the programme itself communicated anything, however, it's that dead oceans are a much stronger possibility than that question mark implies.
The threat, in fact, appears to be immediate and all but irreversible. One scientist said: We risk losing species before we've even been introduced to them. The living ocean is very fragile, said another. Don't for a minute believe that we can't screw it up much worse than it is today.
With the sound turned down, this looked like another lush and lavish documentary about sea creatures fronted by David Attenborough, complete with weird-looking squid and humpback whales glinting in the sun.
But the soundtrack was, for the most part, a litany of stark warnings and dire statistics: our seas fished clean by 2050; all coral poised to die from ocean acidification unless the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is drastically reduced; all whale conversations eventually drowned out by our increasingly noisy shipping.
Before we can take the most basic steps to save our oceans, we need something we've never come close to having: a baseline survey of what's in the sea already. That's where the diligent folks of the Census of Marine Life come in.
They're painstakingly measuring every aspect of ocean life, although it's hard to watch them do it in the present circumstances without wishing they'd do it a bit faster. Dr Julian Caley and his team spend months examining the creatures in one cubic foot of Australian coral reef.
The worm specialist alone has found 22 new species. The fish parasite guy logs, on average, one new species a day; 6,000 previously unknown species have been discovered across the whole census so far.
soooo .... no mention of fukushima-daichi?
"Before we can take the most basic steps to save our oceans, we need something we've never come close to having: a baseline survey of what's in the sea already..."
Actually - that's not true. We can take all sorts of steps before we know what's in the sea already. We can STOP commercial fishing for a decade. We can STOP dumping crap in the ocean, by, for example, NOT fertilizing our ridiculous lawns with crap that ends up in the ocean. We can STOP dumping plastic into the ocean, and last, but not least, we can STOP dumping INDUSTRIAL WASTE into the ocean.
Gee - problem solved and no need for a stupid SURVEY at all. Seriously, people.
This is so sad
Chris Holt, you are exactly right! Mother Nature will take back the planet. Hopefully she takes all the stupid idiots saying the oceans are fine. The oceans are LIFE, without a good eco system we ALL die. If we don't start now then it will happen, THE END
"manage current fish stocks, before they disappear" STOCKS, commodities, not populations, of course they are already owned. Why would I think anything else?
its not humans killing our planet the greedy corporations are killing humans and animals population reduction propaganda made by the chosen people they want it all
Please....! All those in favor for population reduction, please lead the way and depart gracefully now!
Thanks for completely messing up my planet, you useless dicks.
The graphics showing the shipping lanes moving over the habitat of the whales, dolphins, seals, and aquatic life, and the resulting constant noise pollution's effect on sea life's sonar hearing capacity was unknown to me.
Overpopulation of our human species, and our addiction to constant material gratification is destroying our planet's health.
Overpopulation of the human species is at the root of most if not all of our problems. Do pregnant women realize what our planet will be like in the near future? Or is it all just about plastic diapers and creating mini-size
reproductions of the ever special self? Why don't the religious instruct people to use contraception?
well, that is too bad. I was really hoping, judging by the cover, that this was going to be a documentary about vampire remains discovered on the ocean floor.
Ah it is good to be human and at the top of the food chain...reminds me of the Gary Larsen cartoon with a deer holding a smoking shotgun in someones living room...his deer buddy standing at the door asks him why he shot all those people? The deer with the gun replied that he was just thinning the herd.
Our herd won't be thinned much until we exhaust all the resources we can possibly consume. Good luck other species!
555 wats your beef with the music?
whats that at 45 seconds
WOW! They really come out of the woodwork for this sort of documentary!
who makes the decisions on adding the music to these docs and are they really so stupid that they imagine we are so stupid as to need all their aural schlock to make their content palatable. somebody tell them --- it's ok, we can get our poor little proley heads around your (dumbed down) content without you having to coat it in some kind of musical fkkn chocolate and raspberry gateux and insult our poor little intelligence.. GET A FKKN GRIP SOMEONE??
our population will be reduced...
just wait for some awesome earthquakes to hit major cities....
major cities like atlanta which house super diseases....
plauges will reduce us...
i hope it will be in time before we nuke ourselves and destroy the lands....
oh my god. This narrator guy is freakin' annoying... always twitching around and blinking eyes. I know you can be demonstrative while speaking but there's a limit! Everything he says is sooooo dramatic. All I could hear towards the end was his voice going na-na-na-na, na-na-na-na-na.
Anyways, apart from that, I find this documentary was still nice to watch although it's very sad.
@Waldo thanks for what you did ans said. I had a thought that the average IQ of those commenting was very low. Don't you people see we can't continue to do business as usual. Stick your head in the sand and you won't see anything. I suppose as long as Oprah and American Idol are on and I can get a 20 pack on McNuggets and some 36% beef tacos from Taco Bell I don't care. NOT
How about that Texas-sized island of plastic/trash that is floating around in the South Pacific?
"Live in Hope?" The time to do something was yesterday... Can you say "Sixth Extinction," class? Just one more dreary example of why we need to reduce the population of this planet by 95 percent, the sooner, the better. Until then, you can kiss the oceans, and the planet, good-bye.
i meant some people, so many people, not all though, but too much none the less!
it is sad that people who watch all these documentaries on this site are so polluted, conservative, blind and closed-minded -that is the REAL tragedy, not the ocean!!!
@ waldo. fair enough! either way we are all directly responsible for the pollution of our planet in one form or another, it cant go on forever,ultimately the death of the human race will be our own doing how stupid are we as a race???!!
maybe John Adams should talk to Will STeger as I did several years ago on his return from CAnada where he traveled to visit Indigenous peoples to see how they view todays climate. Now that is only their view from their vantage point, but they see a definite warming. in any case, it is humanities dominion that created the multitude of problems, and dominion which makes them more and more complex. Yet it is not in dominion where they can be remedied of course, but only in alliance with natures laws.in your battle you can only win by NOT feeding the sources that rule us and to teach others to do the same. quit playing and quit feeding them while they dissolve, but that also means you dismantle all the organizations that have brought us (led us) to this point... govs, religions and the infinite based corporations and / or economies of the world. I watched DAn Nocera of MIT invent(and open source) a simple way to split hydrogen from oxygen... a sure fire way to decentralize power that should be embraced by the people of the world. we'll see.