Research: "Oceans are not in good shape"

WASHINGTON — Oceans cover more than 70 percent of the planet, and every single spot has been affected by people in some way.

Researchers studying 17 activities ranging from fishing to pollution compiled a new map showing how and where people have impacted the seas.

The map was released at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston and published in today's edition of the journal Science.

"Our results show that when these and other individual impacts are summed up, the big picture looks much worse than I imagine most people expected. It was certainly a surprise to me," said lead author Ben Halpern, an assistant research scientist at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

The areas most affected include the North Sea, the South and East China Seas, Caribbean Sea, the east coast of North America, the Mediterranean Sea, the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, the Bering Sea and parts of the western Pacific, the study found. It said the least-

affected areas are near the poles.

However, the researchers said human activities likely will affect polar regions more and more as climate change warms those areas.

"There were two things we didn't anticipate," Halpern said in a telephone interview. "Every single spot in the oceans was affected by at least one human activity. ... We figured there'd be places people just hadn't gotten to yet."

And "more than 40 percent is impacted by multiple different activities," he added. "The oceans are not in good shape."

Yet Halpern did find room for hope.

"There are some areas in fairly good condition. They are small and scattered, but have fairly low impact," he said. "That suggests that with effort from all of us, we can try to protect these patches and use them as a guideline for what we'd like the rest of the ocean to start looking like."

Impacts studied by researchers included the effects of structures such as oil rigs and commercial shipping as well as species invasion, climate-change impacts, various types of fishing and several types of human-related pollution.