Science Snippets: Why We Must Protect the Global Ocean Forever

Draft script:

A line I’ve mentioned many times, although never in this space: Forever is a long time, especially toward the end. It’s intended to be funny, although I suspect most people will disagree.

The oceanographic online magazine published an article on 4 June 2025 titled World’s ocean experts want ‘forever ban’ on high seas exploitation. The subhead: “Led by marine scientist and Oceanographic Magazine contributor, Professor Callum Roberts a newly published paper - ‘Why we should protect the high seas from all extraction, forever’ - calls for a ‘complete and permanent protection of the high seas.’”

Now, that’s ambitious. After all, forever is a long time. Not only that, but the world’s oceans comprise a huge volume of water. More than 70% of Earth’s surface is covered by ocean. Not surprisingly, life on Earth emerged from this large body of saltwater. As famous environmentalist Paul Watson has pointed out many times: “if the oceans die, we die. We can’t live on this planet with a dead ocean.”

The article at oceanographic opens with this paragraph: “Extractive activity on the international high seas – including fishing, seabed mining, and oil and gas exploitation – should be ‘banned forever’, a community of the world’s leading ocean scientists have stated in a new paper published ahead of the United Nations Ocean Conference.”

Further into the article at oceanographic we find a definition and a cause for concern: “The high seas is the term given to the vast expanse of international waters beyond national jurisdiction which cover 43% of the planet’s surface and two-thirds of its living space. Yet they remain largely unprotected and increasingly threatened by overfishing, climate disruption, and the rising interest in deep sea mining.” More than 70% of Earth is covered with the oceans, and international waters cover more than 60% of that total. Considering that the world’s nations get along about as well as two-year-old humans fighting over candy, this large amount of international waters is a significant issue.

The article at oceanographic points out that “the high seas are Earth’s largest and most secure carbon sink. This means protecting them is critical to preserving the biological and nutrient cycles that draw down and keep atmospheric carbon dioxide in check.”

I turn now to the peer-reviewed, open-access paper. The paper was created by 12 scholars and published on 4 June 2025 in the renowned journal, Nature. It is titled Why we should protect the high seas from all extraction, forever. The subtitle: “Exploitation of the high seas risks doing irreversible damage to biodiversity, climate stability and ocean equity. A consensus must be built now to save them.”

The peer-reviewed paper opens with a brief overview before providing a compelling case for protecting the world’s ocean: “International waters, also known as the high seas, make up 61% of the ocean and cover 43% of Earth’s surface — amounting to two-thirds of the biosphere by volume. They have been exploited since the seventeenth century for whales, and from the mid-twentieth century for fish, sharks and squid, depleting wildlife. Now, climate change is reducing the productivity of the high seas through warming and through depletion of nutrients and oxygen. Proposals to fish for species at greater depths and mine the sea bed threaten to wreak yet more damage, putting the ocean’s crucial role in maintaining the stability of Earth’s biosphere at risk.”

The peer-reviewed paper continues with three paragraphs that provide additional cause for concern: “Less than 1% of the area of the high seas is protected, however. This is because there has been no globally accepted mechanism to do so beyond Antarctica. The United Nations High Seas Treaty was agreed in 2023 to fill this governance gap and expand the number of marine protected areas in international waters. It is crucial to protect at least 30% of the world’s oceans by 2030, as agreed under the Global Biodiversity Framework in 2022.

But the High Seas Treaty could take years to come into force. Sixty countries are required to ratify it; as this article was published, only 28 had done so. Processes and mechanisms are yet to be set up. And its implementation is likely to be hampered by a lack of data, disagreements about divisions of responsibilities and the perennial problems associated with multilateralism.

Given the urgency of addressing the climate and biodiversity crises, the world can’t wait another decade to fix the problems humans have created. Ocean life is too precious and important to lose, and shifts in the chemical and physical environments of the sea, once made, will be irreversible on timescales of centuries to millennia.”

Never mind the strong likelihood that humans will be extinct by 2030. Never mind the extreme unlikelihood that 32 more countries will ratify the High Seas Treaty in the near future. Never mind that the near future is the only future we have. Setting all that aside, how do you suppose the collective mass of humanity will agree to do anything that matters? We have a long history of addressing serious concerns through conflict, rather than cooperation. As scholar Arundhati Roy points out: “Once weapons were manufactured to fight wars. Now wars are manufactured to sell weapons.”

The paper in Nature continues with additional dire information within a section titled “Oceans store carbon and nutrients”: “The high seas are home to an immense diversity of wildlife, including megafauna, such as cetaceans, turtles, tuna and sharks that migrate over vast distances. They also play a crucial part in Earth’s carbon cycle, which is essential for life and the balance of gases in the atmosphere. Indeed, with an average depth of 4,100 metres, the high seas are the planet’s largest and most secure carbon sink.

The crucial role of marine life in the high seas influences the global carbon cycle through two mechanisms: the biological pump and the nutrient pump. In the biological pump, fish and invertebrates living in the twilight ‘mesopelagic’ zone (at depths of 200–1,000 metres) comprise billions of [metric] tonnes of biomass and undertake daily vertical migrations, feeding by night near the surface and returning by day to the deep, where they deposit carbon-rich faeces. Without this cycle, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels could be 200 parts per million higher, and Earth possibly 3 °C warmer, than under pre-industrial conditions.”

The bottom line comes in the final paragraph of the peer-reviewed paper: “We recognize that there is currently no clear path by which this proposal could be implemented. But it has a precedent in the way the world came together in the 1950s to protect the Antarctic continent. We should do it again for the high seas in support of all life on Earth.”

We certainly should. We certainly can. Will we? Call me pessimistic, but I have my doubts.