In the 2010, July/August Smithsonian magazine, there is an interesting piece about Jellyfish: The Next King of the Sea.
You may be asking what jellyfish has to do with China. Before I’m done, I will make that connection.
The piece mentions about 500 coastal, ocean “dead zones” around the world that have been so depleted of oxygen due to manmade pollution that the acidity level of the oceans is rising and threatening most of the life there.
Imagine the oceans without turtles, whales or porpoises and no more salmon suppers.
The Smithsonian says few sea creatures survive in these “dead zones” but the jellyfish does. A map in the magazine shows that the east coast of the U.S.A. and the Gulf Coast are thick with “dead zones”.
Europe is also dense with “dead zones” and so are Southern Japan and the tip of South Korea.
However, what’s surprising is how few dead zones there are along China’s coast.
The reason for that may be the fact that China started to industrialize in the 1980s, but Europe and America started polluting more than a century earlier than China, which I mentioned in Where Did All that Pollution Come From.
Maybe China will realize that they still have time to save the oceans along their shores and do something before they have as many “dead zones” as the US and Europe.
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
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