The waters around Sri Lanka are among the most heavily damaged and polluted ocean regions in the world, a study has revealed. The research by a team of American, British and Canadian researchers was published in yesterday's edition of Science. Activities like water and air pollution, overfishing, commercial shipping or greenhouse gas emission are continually damaging the planet and there is no sign that they will ever stop. Apparently, the most affected areas are "the North and Norwegian seas, South and East China seas, Eastern Caribbean, North American eastern seaboard, Mediterranean, Persian Gulf, Bering Sea, and the waters around Sri Lanka, the study said. The survey, analysing all 17 activities through which humans impact the oceans, and their conclusion was that every square mile of the ocean has been damaged in some way. The researchers have designed a map that emphasizes and explains the results of their study. The map was released at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston and published in yesteday's edition of the journal Science, the Associated Press reported. "Our results show that when these and other individual impacts are summed up, the big picture looks much worse than I imagine most people expected. It was certainly a surprise to me,' said lead author Ben Halpern, an assistant research scientist at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis at the University of California, Santa Barbara, according to the Associated Press. The oceans around the polar areas are the least impacted, but scientists predict they will be damaged more and more in the following years, as long as the global warming continues. "There were two things we didn't anticipate,' Halpern added in the telephone interview. "Every single spot in the oceans was affected by at least one human activity ... we figured there'd be places people just hadn't gotten to yet.' Some good news is that, in the Congress yesterday, the House voted the approval of $454 million for ocean exploration programmes and studies over the next seven years, at the National Geographic and Atmospheric Administration. Ben Halpern still has hope that things can be improved. "There are some areas in fairly good condition. They are small and scattered, but have fairly low impact. That suggests that with effort from all of us, we can try to protect these patches and use them as a guideline for what we'd like the rest of the ocean to start looking like,' he stated. e-News