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Challenges for the Ocean
Summary
This chapter outlines three major challenges facing the ocean: overfishing, deep-sea mineral extraction, and climate change, with emphasis on the ocean's central role in regulating global climate and sustaining biological resources. It is an overview chapter rather than a primary research article.
The ocean is a paradoxical system. Deep, dark waters are rich in nutrients because they mineralize the “organic rain” from surface waters. The first challenge is overfishing. The exploitation of biological resources concerns almost exclusively the upper trophic levels. The second challenge is the exploitation of the mineral resources of the deep sea. The third challenge is climate change. The ocean plays a major role in regulating the global climate. Biological resources vary according to climatic conditions and variations in these conditions affect catches of species of commercial interest. The ocean faces many other challenges: the impacts of climate change on coastal areas increased anthropogenic discharge leading to the expansion of dead zones, large-scale dissemination of plastics with both an accumulation in eddies of general currents and a fractionation in the form of microplastics ingested by all components of food webs, and so on.