WASHINGTON, Feb. 14 (Xinhua) -- A new atlas of the world's oceans reveals that human activities have strongly impacted about 40 percent of the area and have left only about 4 percent relatively pristine.

    Results of the study by an international team of scientists from the United States, Britain and Canada were released on Thursday and will be published on the Feb. 15 issue of journal Science.

    The most highly affected regions include the eastern Caribbean, the North Sea, and Japanese waters, and the least affected ones are around the poles, according to the new results, which should be useful for prioritizing marine conservation projects.

    This high-resolution, global map reflects 17 different types of human impact on marine ecosystems, including climate change, fishing and pollution.

    The research team compiled data from a variety of sources and fed them into a model that assigned each square kilometer of the ocean a single value. That value reflects the overall impact of all the human-induced changes at work in that particular spot.

    The results show that no areas of the ocean are completely untouched by human activities, roughly one third of them is heavily impacted, and the most heavily impacted environments are the continental shelves, rocky reefs, coral reefs, seagrass beds and seamounts.