Russia cannot be allowed to block this vital plan to protect the oceans

The science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke once observed that our planet has been given a singularly inappropriate name. We should not call it Earth, he observed. We should call it Ocean.

It is a well made point. The one truly remarkable feature of our world is not its solid interior but the presence of a great layer of liquid water that stretches across much of its surface: our oceans. Thanks to them, Earth resembles a large, blue marble when viewed from space. By contrast, the solar system’s other planets consist of globes of rock or giant balls of gas. We live in a blue world of water that provided homes for the evolution of early livings beings and that continues to nurture us today. We owe our existence and our survival to our oceans and we should take care to protect them. They may cover 360 million square kilometres of Earth’s surface, but that represents only the thinnest of coats on our planet, one roughly equivalent to the skin that protects an apple.

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Source: Guardian Environment