Rising sea levels pose a far bigger eco threat than previously thought. This week's climate change conference in Copenhagen will sound an alarm over new floodings - enough to swamp Bangladesh, Florida, the Norfolk Broads and the Thames estuary.
Washington - Seven hundred miles west of Seattle in the Pacific at Ocean Station Papa, a first-of-its-kind buoy is anchored to monitor a looming environmental catastrophe.
For the first time, scientists have compiled a comprehensive map of the oceans showing the extent to which they have been damaged by man. The map integrates 17 different kinds of human activity - such as nitrogen fertilisers being washed into the sea from farming - and 20 types of ocean ecosystem, from coral reefs to mangrove forests, to study which parts of the marine environment have suffered most. The scientists found more than 40 per cent of the oceans bear the scars of serious environmental degradation and that only a small percentage have remained as pristine regions free of human influence.
Video images scanned from the seafloor revealed a boneyard of crab skeletons, dead fish and other marine life smothered under a white mat of bacteria. At times, the camera's unblinking eye revealed nothing at all - a barren undersea desert in waters renowned for their bounty of Dungeness crabs and fat rockfish.
