Human interaction with ocean resources has historically been challenging due to the difficulties that arise when a terrestrial species aims at becoming successful in a marine environment. Shipwrecks, for instance, have doomed coastal communities for centuries, and even today fishing is one of the deadliest sectors in the labor force. Similarly, human-induced marine environmental catastrophes, such as oil spills for instance (Trevors & Saier, 2010), have commonly been laborious to clean up due to the inherent difficulty of humans performing beyond terrestrial ecosystems.Continued human population and economic growth since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution have exacerbated the need of human societies for mineral ores, fossil fuels, and other sources of energy, water, and food. This has led to the occupation of vast areas of terrestrial land, to the extent that humans now have a noticeable footprint in all the world's terrestrial biomes. In the world's oceans this same pattern has occurred at a slower pace throughout the decades, with fishing activities becoming more efficient with the arrival of steam vessels in the 1880s, diesel in the 20th century (Engelhard, 2008), and the incorporation of sophisticated detection systems turning ancestral coastal fishing activities into highly industrialized systems that land millions of metric tons of fish and other marine species annually (Fornshell & Tesei, 2013). Similarly, oil rigs spread quickly in the world's ocean to provide additional fossil fuel supplies for thirsty growing economies (Nyman, 2015), marine fright soared with the process of globalization (Mersin et al., 2019) with thousands of cargo vessels swarming the seas and, more recently, seabed mining has appeared in the public and private agenda as an alternative and lucrative sector to maintain the supply of metal ores in the technosphere (Levin et al., 2020). This increased pressure of human activities on the ocean and its resources has translated into a series of environmental impacts that have affected marine conservation (Knowlton, 2021) and degraded vast areas of the ocean. However, it must be noted that not all environmental impactsThis is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.