Press Gallery
Dieses Jahr könnte entscheidend werden, was den Meeresschutz betrifft – doch Gefahren lauern überall. Ein globales Abkommen ist vonnöten.
Comment from the English-speaking world
The 60th anniversary of the expedition that first took humans to the highest spot on earth — the peak of Everest — was widely celebrated seven years ago. The 60th anniversary of the first expedition to its deepest point has gone almost unnoticed. Yet that trip to the bottom of the Challenger Deep, at the southern end of the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean, was an equally remarkable feat. …
[O]nly two more people have followed … Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh, who reached the bottom in 1960. … [In] 2012, film-maker James Cameron conducted a solo dive to the almost 11km-deep valley. Last year, explorer Victor Vescovo followed suit. …
[T]he depth of the Mariana Trench ensures it is perpetually dark, and that temperatures are only just above freezing. Yet … if it is an inhospitable space for humans, it is far from deserted. … The area now enjoys protection, escaping unscathed after it was listed as one of the 27 national monuments that Donald Trump placed under review in 2017.
Other parts of the deep sea are at immediate risk. … An analysis published last month in the journal One Earth warned of the threat … [from] the recent rise in marine industrialisation, which includes seabed mineral mining.
Greenpeace warned last year that 29 ocean-floor exploration licences had been issued, covering an area totalling 1.3 million sq km … threatening to worsen the climate emergency by disrupting carbon stores in seafloor sediments, as well as destroying barely explored habitats that might offer extraordinary scientific insights — and even new medicines.
Though the UN is supposed to wrap up a global ocean treaty this year, many campaigners are pessimistic about the prospect of it offering the protection they believe is needed. Governments must do better. To fall short would not only threaten the habitats and creatures of the deep, but humans too, however unlikely most of us are to ever venture down there.