Scientists at the University of British Columbia (UBC) will lead a research project that aims to give people a look into the future of the world's oceans, using 3D gaming technology.

"We've all heard how there is a big problem in the ocean. But we need to get the attention of policy makers," says Dr. Villy Christensen in an interview from Tokyo. "As scientists we're good at going out with spreadsheets, but now we will use 3D gaming as a credible way of creating this underwater world, not just by numbers, but by showing it."

He says rather than showing politicians and members of the public reports that line up rows of statistics to represent how fisheries are declining, they will translate the data into animations "that take them on a field trip under the ocean."

"One of the biggest challenges for conservation of fisheries is that most people can't see the state of our oceans with their own eyes because from the surface everything seems unchanged," says Dr. Daniel Pauly, who in 1998 developed a groundbreaking theory on measuring the decline of fisheries globally.

The UBC Fisheries Centre just last week published a research paper that concluded the Earth has run out of room to expand fisheries.

That paper, published in the journal PLoS ONE, says fisheries expanded at a rate of one million square kilometres a year from the 1950s through the 1970s. During the same period, there was nearly a fivefold increase in catch, going from 19 million tonnes in 1950 to a peak of 90 million tonnes in the late 1980s, before dropping to 87 million tonnes in 2005.



(Source: B.C. scientists map out the ocean's destiny [Globe and Mail])