THE EFFECTS OF POLLUTION
After educating oneself about the causes of the predicament our oceans and its inhabitants are suffering, we need to identify the effects of those harmful toxins and waste products. Ocean pollution has numerous consequences which affect marine life, wild life and humans directly and indirectly. The following are the most common effects of pollution:
Oxygen Depletion in Seawater
The oxygen content of the ocean is depleting at a dangerously fast pace of 2% since the middle of the 20th century. That is, the volume of water which have completely depleted of oxygen has devastatingly quadrupled since the 1960s. The main reason to such occurrence is the excess debris lying on the ocean's floor, consuming oxygen while degrading over millions of years. Adding on, the accumulation of nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus also causes depletion. It is worth mentioning that a great amount of depleted oxygen in a certain water body subjects marine life to extinction; making the area so called, "dead zone".
Harm to Marine Life
Ocean pollution has made the beautiful marine creatures pay a huge toll for our irreverence towards the cleanliness of our planet's water bodies. The pitiful sea animals have become the number one victims of pollution. Taking oil spillage as an example, marine animals have suffered from suffocating and poisoning due to the spillage permeating their gills. Creatures that aren’t killed by crude oil may suffer from cancer, behavioral changes and become unable to reproduce, such as the seabirds which are subject to paralysis if crude oil gets into their feathers. Furthermore, marine aquatics also mistake small plastic debris for food or become entangled in or strangled by plastic bags and discarded fishing nets.
Threat to Our Well-being
As it has always been, what goes around comes around, so harming other habitats and cutting off food chains will do us as humans nothing but distress. Small organisms ingest toxins and are eaten by larger predators, many of which are seafood that we eventually eat. Taking in toxins to the human body will eventually kill tissues and weaken the immunity system to cause more serious health conditions
Constricting the Lungs of the Ocean
Through frequent dumping of waste, especially plastics, into our ocean, we create giant floating waste islands that are blocking the little sunlight from reaching the phytoplankton's of the ocean, phytoplankton's being the lungs of the ocean. Why? Because as they photosynthesize they release oxygen into the water's of the ocean, stabilizing it's oxygen concentration and keeping conditions suitable for life. However with careless oil leaks and waste dumping in the ocean, the surface is blocked of sunlight, disabling the phytoplankton to photosynthesize, thus putting an end to the oxygen production underwater. This causes that area to be uninhabitable to most of the ocean life.