Article Summary:

Australian Geographic has published an except from a report from February 2008, conducted by an international team of scientists led by Dr Benjamin Halpern of the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in Santa Barbara, USA. The study found that only 4% of the worlds oceans are now undamaged by human activity. Climate change, fishing, pollution, and other human factors have taken their toll in some way on all the other 96 per cent of the and a staggering forty-one per cent of the oceans are seriously damaged.

The article goes on to contrast this with the amazing biodiversity discovered more recently during the Census of Marine Life and the reality that this new discovery is already at threat due to the degradation of the oceans