Dying Oceans, Poisoned Seas

In 1942, when French Undersea Explorer Jacques Cousteau explored the Sargasso Sea, he could see underwater for about 300 ft. Today, he reports, the visibility has shrunk to barely 100 ft. When he first started diving in the Mediterranean 25 years ago, it was filled with life. Today? "You can hardly see a fish 3 in. long." What has happened is that pollution has caught up with the seas' and oceans' ability to cleanse themselves. Cousteau estimates that the vitality of the seas, in terms of fish and plant life, has declined some 30% to 50% in the past 20 years.

In recent weeks, Cousteau and other worried specialists have been spelling out just how polluted the seas and oceans have become. Testifying before a United Nations symposium on the environment in Geneva, Swiss Marine Explorer Jacques Piccard warned that if nothing is done, all the oceans will be dead before the end of the century. Cousteau, who speaks with the authority of numerous dives made in virtually all of the planet's deep waters, told Senator Ernest Rolling's subcommittee on oceans and atmosphere that even the remote reef off Madagascar is "frankly dead today." In a very few years, he added, "there will be nothing alive" in the deeper waters of the Black Sea and the Red Sea.

Scientists point out that while water covers 70% of the earth's surface, it is a covering only, quite thin when compared with the bulk of the globe as a whole. It cannot be treated as a bottomless sewer, capable of absorbing any amount of pollution. In fact, says Piccard, "Phytoplankton, the primitive plant life that generates most of the earth's oxygen, is surface matter. It absorbs dirt and acts as a sort of pollution filter. Thus all you need to knock out is the surface phytoplankton, and the entire marine life cycle is fatally disrupted." That disruption is accelerating logarithmically. At one Baltic measuring station, Environmentalist Barry Commoner points out, the oxygen content of water samples was 2.5 cc. per liter in 1900. The figure gently declined to 2.0 cc. by 1940, but in only 30 years since then it has plummeted to 0.1 cc.

Piccard estimated that what he calls Homo technicus releases between 5,000,000 and 10,000,000 tons of polluting petroleum products every year to float on the seas' sensitive surface. Up to 1.8 million tons come from automobile exhaust emissions which rise into the atmosphere and eventually precipitate onto the ocean surface. Tankers spill another million. The world's polluted rivers spew out the rest.

To help combat the problem of ocean pollution, Cousteau is pushing for expanded research, especially by such tools as the "Sky Lab" satellite for underwater observation, which could spot and measure concentrations of pollution. He has also called upon the 14 industrialized nations that he estimates are responsible for 80% of the oceans' pollution to join forces and act quickly--before it is too late.

Dirty Lungs. Unfortunately, this may be easier said than done. For one thing, there is no guarantee that all maritime nations will stop or can be made to stop their headlong rush toward the industrialization that accounts for most pollution. It will be equally difficult to clean up the mess already at hand. The Mediterranean, for instance, is badly ventilated. Water flowing in from the Atlantic through the narrow Strait of Gibraltar is flushed by outflow from four "lungs" --the Adriatic, the Aegean and the Rhone and Nile rivers. But these lungs, as Britain's Lord Ritchie-Calder notes grimly, are now polluted.

While some scientists look toward expensive hardware for salvation, Piccard sees a very basic solution. He is convinced that as pollution gets worse, "each human being will be forced to make personal sacrifices," and that "such nonsense as planned obsolescence in manufacturing should have been banned long ago." Underdeveloped countries may still continue to raise their standard of living, he adds, but it will go down in the highly industrialized nations. "Curbing industrialization, and especially forcing down the worldwide birth rate, may seem unattainable goals," says Piccard, but "it's a matter of to be or not to be."

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