Humans are on the verge of causing an unprecedented mass extinction event in the Planet Earth’s oceans – but there is still time to stop the disaster.  That’s according to a groundbreaking analysis of data from hundreds of sources and published in the journal Science.

“If you cranked up the aquarium heater and dumped some acid in the water, your fish would not be very happy,” said Dr. Malin Pinsky of Rutgers University, one of the study’s coauthors.  “In effect, that’s what we’re doing to the oceans.”

The oceans are vast and appear to be infinite.  The truth beneath the waves is chilling.

Coral reefs have declined 40 percent worldwide, partly because human activity is making the oceans warmer and more acidic.  The loss of habitat is wreaking havoc on fragile ecosystems.  Mangrove swamps are being replaced by fish farms.  Bottom trawling has already adversely affected 20 million square miles of ocean, scraping up the sea floor and turning parts of the continental shelf to rubble.  International shipping has drastically increased the number of freighters criss-crossing the globe.  Don’t even get me started on over-fishing and oil exploration.  And then there’s seabed mining, now covering 460,000 square miles of ocean floor – up from zero in 2000.

“We may be sitting on a precipice of a major extinction event,” said ecologist and coauthor Douglas J. McCauley of the University of California – Santa Barbara.

But maybe, just maybe, there’s time to stop it.  Much of the oceans is still wild enough to bounce back to health.

“We’re lucky in many ways,” said Dr. Pinsky.  “The impacts are accelerating, but they’re not so bad we can’t reverse them.”

The problem with earlier research was that it was very difficult to judge the well-being of a species living underwater, over thousands of miles.  Changes in some parts of the oceans may not necessarily mean that changes are changes are occurring across the planet.

But the new analysis pulled together data from an enormous range of sources: from discoveries in the fossil record to statistics on modern container shipping, fish catches and seabed mining.