Ocean Suffers

The atlas, which was unveiled here Thursday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, was drawn up by combining impact data for 17 different activities, ranging from fishing and commercial shipping to pollution and climate change.

Coral reefs, continental shelves and the deep ocean were the hardest-hit ecosystems, the international team behind the research reported. The biggest human impact was seen in the North Sea, the South and East China Seas, the Caribbean and North America's East Coast. The least-affected areas were largely near the poles.

This global map shows cumulative human impact across 20 ocean ecosystem types. The map is color-coded to show very high impact (red), high impact (dark orange), medium high impact (light orange), medium impact (yellow), low impact (green) and very low impact (blue). Forty-one percent of the area has experienced medium high to very high impact, scientists say.

Ben Halpern / NCEAS

Although such impacts have been studied individually before, the team members said their atlas, based on four years of research and published in Friday's issue of the journal Science, represented the first attempt to synthesize all those studies into one global database.

"For the first time, we have produced a global map of all of these different activities, laid on top of each other, so that we can get the big picture of all the impacts humans are having," Ben Halpern, the study's lead author, told journalists Thursday.

That big picture looks considerably worse than previously thought, said Halpern, who is an assistant research scientist at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, or NCEAS, based at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

For the rest of this important story, visit MSNBC - Map Shows How Oceans Suffer in Graphic Detail.