About 22 percent of the waters in Bohai Sea have been polluted in the past 30 years due to the rapid development of the local economy, People's Daily Online reported.

The massive dead scallops are found in the beach of Laoting county, north China's Hebei Province, Sept. 1, 2011,.?Fishermen in the province are preparing to sue the U.S.-based oil giant ConocoPhillips, as they believe recent oil spills in a nearby bay are blamed for large numbers of marine life dying. [sina.com]

Experts said the impact of the oil spills by ConocoPhillips is only part of the problem, because about 80 percent of the pollutants in the Bohai Sea come from land. Many industrial zones have been set up along the Bohai coast, and most of the enterprises there are heavy polluters. It was reported that 95 percent of the waters in Tianjin were severely polluted in 2010.

According to experts, the sharp decrease of runoff from the Yellow River, one of the largest rivers that flows into the Bohai Sea, has raised the salinity of the sea in the past years, which has imperiled the living conditions for the local marine life.

The seafood generated from the three big bays of the Bohai Sea—Laizhou Bay in Shandong, Bohai Bay in Tianjin, and Liaodong Bay in Liaoning, used to take up 40 percent of the national output, but these days it is hard to find any trace of shrimp there.

Nearly two thirds of the marine life in Laizhou Bay has vanished, with numbers of remaining marine species in sharp decline. It is believed that the Bohai Sea is experiencing "marine desertification"—a situation where the ecology of the sea is destroyed to the point where few creatures can continue to live there.

Under the existing economic development mode, pollutants discharged into the Bohai Sea will continue to build up, prompting the need for urgent corrective action, experts said.