A team led by Ben Halpern of the University of California, Santa Barbara, created the first global map that shows the various kinds of damage being done to marine ecosystems.
The team assigned scores to 17 human impacts and tallied them up for every ocean region to reveal the overall effect people are having on marine life.
"The ocean is so big, I figured there would be a lot of areas that we hadn't gotten to or that people rarely get to," Halpern said.
"But when you look at the map, there are huge areas that are being impacted by multiple human activities," he said. "It was certainly a surprise to me."
The project revealed that more than 40 percent of the world's marine ecosystems are heavily affected.
Major hot spots include the North Sea off the northern coast of Europe and Asia's South China Sea and East China Sea.
The study will be published tomorrow in the journal Science.
According to this article at National Geographic.com the whole of the oceans has been effected by humanity. The whole of the oceans, 71%, over 2 third of the earth, 361 million square kilometers (224 million square miles) (). Think about that.
I would support all projects and studies about our water systems, ocen water are big but we are killing daily.