Author: Jessica Leigh Hester / Source: Atlas Obscura
Humans have a way of leaving fingerprints everywhere, even in places we never physically touch.
This is perhaps especially true in the oceans. Currents carry scraps of our trash far, far from our shores. Plastics are regularly lodged in remote reefs, or even drift down to the deepest corners of the Mariana Trench, or wind up along the Antarctic Peninsula. Bags, bottles, lines, and other synthetic materials break down into impossibly small fragments that wander and roam.But the Earth’s oceans are vast, and a team of researchers recently set out to map what’s left of the unsullied seas.
In a recent paper in Current Biology, scientists from the Wildlife Conservation Society, University of Queensland, and other institutions concluded that only 13.2 percent of the world’s waters count as marine wilderness (that is, places relatively unscathed by human influence).
To pinpoint these spots, researchers considered the impact of 15 different human-driven factors—from runoff to fishing—on marine environments, and then identified regions that fall into the bottom 10 percent of impact from these categories. (When they conducted another analysis that included four variables related to climate change, there was basically nothing left.)…
The post Found: The Last Traces of Unspoiled Ocean appeared first on FeedBox.