The Australian government has declared two new massive marine parks in the Indian Ocean in a bid to conserve the area.Sussan Ley, the Minister for the Environment, announced on Wednesday that the marine parks will cover up to 740,000 square km, .
Australia establishes new marine parks
Xinhua
13 May 2021, 13:05 GMT+10
CANBERRA, May 13 (Xinhua) The Australian Government has declared two new massive marine parks in the Indian Ocean in a bid to conserve the area. Sussan Ley, the Minister for the Environment, announced on Wednesday the government would establish two new marine parks covering up to 740,000 square km, an area bigger than France and twice the size of the Great Barrier Reef marine park, around Cocos and Christmas Islands off the coast of Western Australia (WA). It will increase the proportion of Australia s waters under marine park protection from 37 to 45 percent. Ley said the move will deliver greater protection from illegal fishing operations.
The area is more than twice the size of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park and, once declared, would be the second largest protected area in Australia’s waters behind the 989,000 sq km Coral Sea marine park.
Christmas Island, which emerged 60m years ago from a volcanic seamount, is about 350km south of Indonesia and 1,500km west of Australia. The island is known for its migration of millions of red crabs that move from the forests to the shore and were made famous by Sir David Attenborough.
The Cocos (Keeling) Islands, about 970km west of Christmas Island, are two coral atolls surrounded by deep ocean.
A blue shark captured by the underwater camera network.
The targets: loggerhead turtles, silky sharks and sailfish. The mission: figure out how many of them are left.
The UK announced on Saturday it would launch a worldwide effort to monitor wildlife in the open oceans, hoping to fill a blue hole of scientific knowledge and get a clearer sense of which aquatic populations are under threat.
The project, akin to an underwater spy network, will fund a fleet of small action cameras, complete with bait, to be deployed about 30 feet beneath the ocean’s surface. Researchers will place a camera in the water where they hope to gather data, and it will record anything that swims near within a given window of time. The plan is for the project to span the globe, covering four oceans and the Caribbean in waters near 10 of the UK’s overseas territories.
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