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13: Human Impacts on the Ocean

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    431
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    • 13.1: Pollution - Sources & Types
      As the world’s population growth increase and technology continues to spread worldwide, the navigation of the ocean has become a shipping route and dumping ground for human activities. The continuations of human activities deplete biodiversity and disrupt the natural ecosystem in the ocean. According to the Science Learning, wasting such as chemical, sewage, and industrial run-off have a big problem worldwide. Besides that, a country’s without strong government to enforce existence policies, the
    • 13.2: Noise in the Ocean
    • 13.3: Diseases and Pathogens
      In the ocean, different species of marine life are susceptible to varying types of diseases and pathogens. Different pathogens and diseases may either affect a wide variety of species or specialize on a few.
    • 13.4: Overfishing
      Overfishing occurs when we take too many marine resources at a rate faster than they can reproduce or recover. And as a result, fish populations are becoming severely depleted. In some cases, the end result of overfishing is a permanent collapse in fish supplies. It is important that we move to a more sustainable fishing method that will both maintain a steady food source for coastal communities and reduce the negative effects on marine ecosystems.
    • 13.5: Invasive Species
    • 13.6: Climate & Carbon Cycle
      The carbon cycle can be described as the flux of carbon between the Earth’s sediments, life, and the atmosphere. The amount of carbon present in the earth is always the same but its presence in the various parts of the environment may vary. Humans have been burning fossil fuels and pumping more CO2 into the atmosphere leading to serious alterations to the carbon cycle.
    • 13.7: Eutrophication
      Eutrophication occurs when excess nutrients are introduced into a body of water. This process increases the rate of supply of organic matter in an ecosystem and stimulates aquatic plant growth. At normal levels, these nutrients feed the growth of organisms called cyanobacteria or algae. But with too many nutrients, cyanobacteria grow out of control. Excess algae block the sunlight needed by bottom-dwelling plants and lead to a decrease in oxygen in the water and consequently leads to negative ou

    Thumbnail: Plastic Pollution covering Accra beach. (CC BY-SA 4.0 international; Muntaka Chasant).


    13: Human Impacts on the Ocean is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by LibreTexts.

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