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How deep is the ocean’s capacity to buffer against climate change? Right now our oceans absorb almost one-third of all our greenhouse gas emissions. During the past three decades, increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide have largely been matched by corresponding increases in dissolved carbon dioxide in the seawater, but climatologists don’t know if the ocean can continue mopping up human-produced carbon at the same rate. Warmer water can’t hold as much carbon dioxide, so the ocean’s carbon capacity is decreasing as it warms.
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There are millions of tons of trash floating in our oceans, much of it plastic (meaning it won’t disappear anytime soon). Scientists are now trying to figure out how to clean it up. The largest "floating island" of plastic trash is in the North Pacific and covers an area twice the size of France. Other trash islands have been discovered in the North and South Atlantic, and scientists suspect that the same thing is taking place in the South Pacific and Indian Oceans. When this plastic floats towards a coastline, it affects tourism. It also kills fish that mistake it for food. Worst of all, contaminants in the water cling to the plastic and are then transported across the world’s oceans.read more

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The plastic kind – Plastic pollution is a big problem in the ocean right now and we can’t wait until tomorrow to clean it up.

By dragging fine-meshed nets along the ocean’s surface, researchers found that while there is a great deal of it there, the volume seems to have stopped increasing, probably due to new laws that prohibit ships from dumping their trash in the ocean. Plastic, which does not dissolve, is still a major problem, though: They found pieces of it in 60% of the over 6,000 samples of trash they examined.
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Our oceans are in trouble. What happened in the past can affect the future. More than 200 million gallons of oil is estimated to have spilled into the Gulf after the April 20 blowout at BP’s Deepwater Horizon, an incident which also killed 11 people. While the surface of the Gulf now looks clean and most of the beaches have been cleared of oil as well, there’s still a lot of oil out there–The explosion left an oil slick on the ocean floor. Will this be a problem in the future?
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