Aquarium of the Pacific

Aquarium Event

Brave New Ocean

The great mass extinctions of the fossil record eliminated entire major groups of organisms that provided opportunities for the subsequent explosive evolution of surviving lineages.

Today, humanity is laying the groundwork for a comparably great mass extinction with unknown ecological consequences. Overfishing, introduced species, global warming, acidification, toxins, and massive runoff of nutrients are transforming once complex ocean ecosystems like coral reefs and kelp forests into monotonous level bottoms, transforming clear and productive coastal seas into anoxic dead zones, and transforming complex food webs topped by big animals into simplified ecosystems dominated by microbes with boom and bust cycles of toxic algal blooms, sea jellies, and disease.

Rates of change are increasingly fast with sudden shifts to communities never seen before. We can only guess at the kinds of organisms that will benefit from this mayhem that is radically altering the seascape far beyond the consequences of fishing or warming alone. The prospects are especially bleak for animals and plants compared to metabolically flexible microbes and algae. Turning these problems around will require fundamentally difficult, costly, and rapid changes in the ways humanity grows food, manufactures commodities, and obtains energy for everything we do. But the consequences of doing nothing are frightening.

Find out more about the threats facing our ocean and how we can help through a special presentation with Dr. Jeremy Jackson at the Aquarium of the Pacific. Dr. Jackson is the William E. and Mary B. Ritter professor of oceanography at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, and senior scientist emeritus at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in the Republic of Panama. His current research includes the long-term impacts of human activities on the oceans and coral reef ecology. He is credited with forming the new ecological understanding of “shifting baseline.” Dr. Jackson’s work on overfishing was chosen by Discover magazine as the outstanding environmental achievement of 2001. He has served on committees and boards of the World Wildlife Fund U.S., the National Research Council, the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, and the Science Commission of the Smithsonian Institution.

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