(task) Out of the blue: World Oceans Day 2016-06-08 | Espresso

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oceans, plastic

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> Out of the blue: World Oceans Day
> Today marine matters will be splashed across global screens. Rightly so: the seas cover about 70% of the planet and produce more than half its oxygen. About 90% of world trade is seaborne. The theme this year is plastic pollution; one estimate is of 5.25 trillion particles, weighing nearly 270,000 tonnes. Many species suffer from it—corals especially, from ingesting microplastics (fragments less than 5mm across). And these creatures are in trouble anyway from bleaching, particularly at Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. Unusually warm ocean temperatures in recent months thanks to El Niño, a climate phenomenon in the tropical Pacific, have caused bleaching: corals expel the colourful single-celled algae they need for photosynthesis and then struggle to make the energy they need to form their skeletons. This may mean humans go hungry: more than a billion people depend upon reef species as a source of food and income.
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