while we praise our tree friends for providing us with oxygen, we cannot forget that it’s actually the ocean (particularly marine plants like phytoplankton) which produce 50-90% of the oxygen on earth. every breath you take, make sure you’re thanking the oceans! while saving the rainforests is vital, saving our oceans is perhaps even more so. in fact, the ocean stores 50 times more carbon dioxide than our atmosphere. climate change and other human activities will harm our oceans will diminish the effectiveness of oceanic carbon sinks, facilitating a positive feedback cycle that will only worsen the climate crisis.
furthermore, oceans affect climate and weather at a large scale globally, acting as a solar heat sink, distributing heat and moisture globally, and driving most of the major weather patterns that we observe across the world. with a changing climate, rising temperatures in oceans can mean spillover effects to our entire global weather system, causing more frequent natural disasters such as droughts, floods, and hurricanes. these events can be disastrous to humanity and ecosystems alike.
an ocean in crisis 