In a milestone for ocean protection, President Barack Obama on Thursday established the first marine national monument in the Atlantic, prohibiting commercial fishing and other types of extraction in a series of deep canyons and extinct undersea volcanoes that lie more than 150 miles off southern New England, along and beyond the continental shelf.

"The notion that the ocean I grew up with is not something I can pass on to my kids and my grandkids is unacceptable. It's unimaginable,” Obama said in announcing the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument at the State Department’s Our Ocean conference in Washington, D.C. "Dangerous changes in our climate caused mainly by human activity, dead zones in our ocean caused mainly by pollution