All In One Boat

Way out in the Pacific, a trillion gallons from nowhere, floats the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, [...roughly the size of Texas, containing approximately 3.5 million tons of trash. Shoes, toys, bags, pacifers, wrappers, toothbrushes, and bottles...]

A couple of intrepid souls have set sail towards it to try to stir up some interest. Junk is a craft, made up of junk, piloted by Marcus and Joel, which got underway from Long Beach on June 1.

Roz Savage, by her own small self, is rowing in the same direction, from San Francisco to Hawaii, by way of the Patch, and now about 83 days into rowing.

The two voyages crossed paths the other day, trading food and water and calloused hand shakes. What a freakin’ adventure!

“- A maroon-striped marauder with venomous spikes is rapidly multiplying in the Caribbean’s warm waters, swallowing native species, stinging divers and generally wreaking havoc on an ecologically delicate region.

The red lionfish, a tropical native of the Indian and Pacific oceans that probably escaped from a Florida fish tank, is showing up everywhere — from the coasts of Cuba and Hispaniola to Little Cayman’s pristine Bloody Bay Wall, one of the region’s prime destinations for divers.

Wherever it appears, the adaptable predator corners fish and crustaceans up to half its size with its billowy fins and sucks them down in one violent gulp.

Research teams observed one lionfish eating 20 small fish in less than 30 minutes.

Lionfish

“Many coastal areas of the world’s oceans are being starved of oxygen at an alarming rate, with vast stretches along the seafloor depleted of it to the point that they can barely sustain marine life, researchers are reporting.

The main culprit, scientists say, is nitrogen-rich nutrients from crop fertilizers that spill into coastal waters by way of rivers and streams.”

Dead Zones

If global warming is the number one danger, where is this? 2? 3, behind water? What to do about it is fairly obvious: stop with the frickin’ nitrogen fertilizers. How much would food production diminish? What other, less dangerous, technologies could increase food production? What percent of food is wasted and how much could that be reduced?

Scientists Say Area That Cannot Support Some Marine Life Is Near Record Size

The “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico, an area on the seabed with too little oxygen to support fish, shrimp, crabs and other forms of marine life, is nearly the largest on record this year, about 8,000 square miles, researchers said this week.

Only the churning effects of Hurricane Dolly last week, they said, prevented the dead zone from being the largest ever.

The problem of hypoxia, very low levels of dissolved oxygen, is a downstream effect of fertilizers used for agriculture in the Mississippi River watershed. Nitrogen is the major culprit, flowing into the Gulf and spurring the growth of algae. Animals called zooplankton eat the algae, excreting pellets that sink to the bottom like tiny stones. This organic matter decays in a process that depletes the water of oxygen.

Researchers expected the dead zone to set a record — even more than the 8,500 square miles observed in 2002 — after the Mississippi, swollen with floodwaters, carried an extraordinary amount of nitrates into the Gulf, about 37 percent more than last year and the most since these factors began being measured in 1970.

Dead Zone

Quite aside from the Olympics, this cannot be good news about China’s environment. It might be good for C02 draw-down, though the critters underneath will not fare well.

“Water quality has been a concern for the sailing events, given that many coastal Chinese cities dump untreated sewage into the sea. At the same time, rivers and tributaries emptying into coastal waters are often contaminated with high levels of nitrates from agricultural and industrial runoff. These nitrates contribute to the red tides of algae that often bloom along sections of China’s coastline.

But officials in Qingdao said pollution and poor water quality did not have a “substantial link” to the current outbreak, according to Xinhua. Instead, scientists blamed the bloom on increased rainfall and warmer waters in the Yellow Sea. Algae are now blooming over more than 12,900 square kilometers, or 5,000 square miles, of the sea, according to Xinhua.”

IHT

More photos.

[thx Rob Egenolf]

There’s not much good to report on these days and truth be told this story isn’t all that good, but then again, it’s not bad.

Contrary to expectations, a microscopic plant that lives in oceans around the world may thrive in the changing ocean conditions of the coming decades, a team of scientists reported Thursday.

The main threat to many marine organisms is not global warming but ocean acidification, as carbon dioxide from the air dissolves into the water and turns into carbonic acid. Acid dissolves calcium carbonate in the skeletons of corals, for example; many scientists fear that acidification of the oceans will kill many, if not most, coral reefs by the end of the century.

Similar concerns have been raised about coccolithophores, single-cell, carbonate-encased algae that are a major link in the ocean food chain. Earlier experiments with a species of coccolithophore, Emiliania huxleyi, had found that lower pH levels (more acidic) hindered the algae’s ability to build the disks of carbonate that form its shell.

In Friday’s issue of the journal Science, however, scientists … report that they found the exact opposite. The algae grew bigger in the more acidic water.

The bad news is at the end of the article. Though this anchor in the food chain might thrive, “The hopeful news for coccolithophores, however, does not overturn the gloomy predictions for corals or negate ocean acidification as an impending ecological disruption…

Important Algae Might Thrive

This is the kind of climate change impact statement we haven’t seen enough of.[And the article in the NY Times on page A21 shows how unimportant it is to editors.] Personal actions like changing light bulbs and walking more are necessary but not nearly sufficient a response to what is confronting us. Towns, cities, counties and states have to get busy at every level of their general plans, infrastructure reviews and expenditure forecasts.

A rise in sea levels and other changes fueled by global warming threaten roads, rail lines, ports, airports and other important infrastructure, and policy makers and planners should be acting now to avoid or mitigate their effects, according to new government reports.

While increased heat and “intense precipitation events” threaten these structures, the greatest and most immediate potential impact is coastal flooding, according to one of the reports, by an expert panel convened by the National Research Council, the research arm of the National Academy of Sciences.

Sea Rise Level Threatens

The 218-page academy report was issued Tuesday, and is available at nationalacademies.org.

…60,000 miles of coastal highways are already subject to periodic flooding, the academy panel called for policy makers to survey vulnerable areas — “roads, bridges, marine, air, pipelines, everything,” Dr. Schwartz said — and begin work now on plans to protect, reinforce, move or replace on safer ground. Those tasks will take years or decades and tens of billions of dollars, at least, he said.

“We need to think about it now,” said Dr. Schwartz, a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

The multiagency report, a draft assessment, is intended to help policy makers do just that. The 800-page draft was posted online last month for public review at climatescience.gov/Library/sap/sap4-1/public-review-draft. It focuses on the area from Montauk Point on Long Island to Cape Lookout, N.C.

“Fishing, fertilizer runoff, pollution, shipping, climate change—these are just a few of the ways that human activities influence the oceans that cover 70 percent of Earth’s surface. And in all that vastness—139 million square miles (360 million square kilometers)—less than 4 percent remains unaffected, and more than a third has suffered serious human impacts, according to a new map published in Science.

Marine ecologist Ben Halpern of the University of California, Santa Barbara’s National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis and an international team of colleagues first listed 17 ways humans affect the oceans and then mapped each of them. By overlaying each impact on top of one another, the ecologists created a “current state of affairs for the oceans,” Halpern says. “I was really surprised that there is no single spot on the planet that isn’t being affected by at least one of these factors.”"

Scary Stuff

“Contamination levels of Richardson Bay waters near the spill site are above the state safety standard, according to preliminary test results released Saturday. County officials said that the contamination did not extend beyond Richardson Bay and that there was no indication San Francisco beaches were affected.

The sample at the Bay Front Office Park, taken upstream of the spill site, had the highest level of contamination, which could be caused by recent rainfalls pushing the sewage-contaminated water upstream, officials said. The Shelter Bay Mill Valley site, located downstream, was slightly elevated. Schoonmaker Beach and Dunphy Park in the Sausalito area showed low levels of bacteria but met the state standard for water recreation. ”

Contamination

“More than two million gallons of partially treated sewage and storm water were dumped into the San Francisco Bay on Thursday night, and officials in Marin County, north of San Francisco, were trying to determine the extent of environmental damage. According to the county sheriff’s office, the spill occurred at a sewage treatment plant in Mill Valley after a pump, and an alarm system meant to monitor it, both failed after several weeks of near-constant rain.

Sewage in Bay

Marin IJ

The recently passed energy bill in Congress, mandating more ethanol, principally from corn, was oblivious to this sort of news.

Because of rising demand for ethanol, American farmers are growing more corn than at any time since World War II. And sea life in the Gulf of Mexico is paying the price.

The nation’s corn crop is fertilized with millions of pounds of nitrogen-based fertilizer. And when that nitrogen runs off fields in Corn Belt states, it makes its way to the Mississippi River and eventually pours into the Gulf, where it contributes to a growing “dead zone” — a 7,900-square-mile patch so depleted of oxygen that fish, crabs and shrimp suffocate.

Killer Corn

Big oil spill on the coast of South Korea

Sea farms and fishing areas on the country’s western coast have been turned into a “sea of oil” following the Friday leakage of oil from a tanker in seas off Taean, South Chungcheong Province, which is believed one of the world’s most devastating sea pollution cases involving oil.

Maritime officials say about 5 percent of the oil has been collected, and about 9,000 soldiers, police, officials and volunteers were struggling to clean up the polluted area, Monday, the fourth day of operations.

The amount of oil spilled _ 10,500 tons _ is more than double the 5,000 tons that leaked from the Sea Prince into seas off Yeosu, South Jeolla Province, Korea’s worst previous oil spill in 1995.

It is also about 28 percent of the 37,000 tons leaked from the Exxon Valdez into Alsaka’s Prince William Sound in 1989, one of the world’s worst sea pollutions by oil. [the recent spill in San Francisco Bay was about 190 tons -- 1/55 of Korean spill.]

The Korea Times

More NYTimes

South Korea—Chung Hwan-hyang surveyed the damage from South Korea’s worst oil spill, saddened by the knowledge that the oyster farm she and her husband ran for 30 years was lost.
more stories like this

“My oysters are all dead,” the 70-year-old woman said Sunday as she and thousands of others cleaned foul-smelling oil from Shinduri Beach. “I cried and cried last night. I don’t know what to do.”

Boston.com / AP

While the Bay Area oil spill of about 65,000 gallons of bunker oil was contained late, it was contained; while oil hit the beaches, volunteers and paid workers were able to get at it in nice weather, stopping for lunches; while birds were covered in oil, dying and struggling not to die the numbers were in the hundreds.

In the Black Sea, matters are entirely different. Different enough, in years of neglect, greed and stupidity, in howling storms that are keeping people off the shore, that one environmentalist said “We could lose the Black Sea if we go on this way.”

Leading Russian environmentalists, meanwhile, said the oil spill was triggered by years of official negligence that allowed oil transport ships to use outdated and inadequate equipment.

“It’s a long-expected disaster,” environmentalist Sergei Golubchikov told journalists in Moscow Tuesday. “We could lose the Black Sea if we go on this way.

Russia has a lot riding on the health of the Black Sea: President Vladimir Putin has pledged to spend $12 billion on developing the port of Sochi as the site of the 2014 Winter Olympics.

Eleven ships sank or ran aground in Sunday’s gale, including the tanker that spilled the fuel and a freighter that carrying sulfur, officials said. The bodies of three crew members from the freighter have been found, and crews were searching for five missing crewmen, said Sergei Kozhemyaka, a spokesman for the Emergency Situations Ministry.

High winds have prevented salvage teams from launching an effort to sweep the oil off the water’s surface, officials said, allowing patches of the slick residue to drift to the seabed, where it could linger for years.

Yelena Vavila, an expert with the regional environmental monitoring agency, warned about “increased concentration of oil in the water for at least five years.”

The most important task now is to build a dam to prevent the slick from floating into the Sea of Azov, said Oleg Mitvol, deputy head of the Russian state environmental safety watchdog Rosprirodnadzor. “We have a real chance to save the ecosystem of the Sea of Azov,” he said.

However, Russia and Ukraine have a long-running argument over which country controls what parts of the waterway. Ukraine has objected in the past to Russian plans to build a similar dam, calling it an attempt to strengthen Moscow’s claim to a disputed island.

Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov visited the region Tuesday and said that most of the oil could be cleaned off the shoreline within three weeks and that all would be gone within 45 days.

Ukraine’s Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych said he would meet with Zubkov and called for review of bilateral relations. “We definitely need to examine, or, perhaps, re-examine the treaty between Ukraine and Russia,” he told the ITAR-Tass news agency.

Meanwhile, scores of birds — weighed down by thick coatings of the fuel oil — hopped weakly along the shore or perched helplessly in the sand. Workers with pitchforks and shovels collected vast clumps of oil mixed with sand, seaweed and dead birds.

Black Sea Death

Of course we all feel stronger about a situation, the closer it is to us. So, the oil spill in San Francisco Bay of some 65,000 gallons of oil and 150 birds dead, has us all alarmed and ready to go out and help, and to damn those who caused the accident.

But as disasters go, it’s relatively small, even if gumming up the shores of paradise.

Take the Black Sea spill of 650,000 gallons and 30,000 birds dead. 11 ships sunk, sailors dead.

A flock of about 1,000 rails, a species of wetland bird, were huddled on the beach, unable to fly because their feathers were coated with oil. Some were unable to stand.

Cleanup workers said wild dogs had been taking advantage of the birds’ condition to attack them. A Reuters reporter found a number of the birds on the beach with their heads torn off.

MSNBC on Black Sea Disaster

Al Jazeera coverage

NYTimes with additional information: damage to persist for year.

It seems a bit cruel to post news of disasters about which we can do little but gape in shock. The elements are almost always the same: idiocy and greed in the face of the predictable. No double hulls on the tankers. River ships used at sea. Ignoring storm reports. [It seems the tanker that broke apart never got its anchor up, leaving it particularly vulnerable. As every sailor knows, in big storms you put to sea.] Improper safety measures. Changing the damn-the-consequences economic culture that rules the world is something we can be part of.

No mention yet of how the ferocity of the storm compares to years past. In the North Sea, a storm front at the same time pushed tides higher higher by several feet and was in process of scaring the bejesus out of everyone before it died down, fearing tides as high as the 1953 disaster when over 2,400 died in Europe.

Update Below

“The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a heap of debris floating in the Pacific that’s twice the size of Texas, according to marine biologists. It is 80 percent plastics and weighs some 3.5 million tons, floating where few people ever travel, in a no-man’s land between San Francisco and Hawaii.”

Great Pacific Garbage Patch

The problem has been growing for years, in the Pacific most notably but in other oceans and bays as well.

PlasticDebris.org , Algalita Marine Research and GreenPeace are good resources.

The SF Chronicle covers the Great Pacific Garbage Patch on Tuesday 30th, including a few remarks from National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) about the possible clean up.

Of all the arctic ice melts that should worry the world Greenland has to be in first place. If ice floating in water melts, sea levels do not rise. If ice on land melts and that water joins the ocean — big problems.

“The rate of melting [in Greenland] is just phenomenal,” said Robert Correll, chairman of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, an international scientific monitoring project. “We’re adding freshwater to the ocean at a much more rapid rate than predicted” by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s most recent estimates, which are based on data through 2005.

Studies show that Greenland is undergoing a rapid meltdown, one with severe consequences for global sea-level rise and the 56,000 people who live on the world’s largest island. Scientists report that glaciers draining the ice cap are picking up speed, while Arctic sea ice shrank this summer to its smallest extent on record, defying computer models that suggested such changes would not occur for decades.

“Arctic sea ice looks like it’s reached the tipping point,” said Robert Bindschadler, a polar ice expert at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “The suddenness of these changes we’ve seen in the Arctic over the past five years have really startled us, and we’ve been struggling to understand what is going on.” …

Scientists say the accelerated melt will have decidedly negative effects for the globe, as it is certain to boost sea levels. The most recent assessment by the U.N. climate change panel forecast a surge of between 8 inches and 2 feet by 2100, but scientists say the rapidly melting ice in Greenland and Antarctica have already rendered those estimates obsolete.

Correll, who was in Greenland last month, described one such effect at work on the island. Just a few years ago, scientists didn’t think meltwater could penetrate to the bottom of the ice sheet, but in recent years that’s exactly what moulins have done.

“These holes have been built by all this swirling, melting water, and they are going straight to the base, where the water lubricates the bottom,” he said. “It’s as if we put oil on the bottom of the ice, so it’s moving much more rapidly.”

As for sea-level rise, Correll said most scientists in the field would argue that it will be “the upper part of a meter” (3 feet 3 inches) this century, roughly twice the current estimates, though nobody knows exactly how the Greenland ice sheet will behave as water intrudes underneath.

“We can’t discount the possibility of an abrupt change, the equivalent of a sudden avalanche of snow,” Correll said. “We don’t think that will happen here, but there are these possibilities.”

Greenland Ice Melt

“[The] onslaught of “living pollution” has been particularly apparent and — in the case of viral hemorrhagic septicemia — gruesome this year. But it’s not new. For decades, the people living along our coastlines have struggled to eradicate or contain foreign plants, animals and microorganisms that enter the United States by the billions each year via international shipping vessels.

The annual cost to the United States of attempting to control aquatic invaders is about $9 billion. That number will continue to rise, as will the rate of new invasive species, unless federal, state and local governments work together to regulate their primary source: ballast water, which is sea water taken on board by ships to provide stability during voyages and dumped overboard once they reach their destinations.”

Heavy Water

17 August 2007

Overview of current sea ice conditions
Yesterday and today, Arctic sea ice surpassed the previous single-day (absolute minimum) record for the lowest extent ever measured by satellite. Sea ice extent has fallen below the 2005 record low absolute minimum and is still melting. Sea ice extent is currently tracking at 5.26 million square kilometers (2.02 million square miles), just below the 2005 record absolute minimum of 5.32 million square kilometers (2.05 million square miles).

Lowest Arctic Sea Ice

There are days when the ciliary muscle fails me; the eye cannot follow-focus.

Suicide Bomber at Parliament Kills 8 Iraqis

Among the dead were at least two lawmakers, both from Sunni Arab parties. Of the 23 people wounded, 11 were parliamentarians, the United States military reported.

Millions More Missing White House Emails

To be clear: these are emails controlled by the White House — not emails on RNC servers, like those other lost emails.

Oceans Vomiting Green Slime

Runoff from modern life is feeding an explosion of primitive organisms. This ‘rise of slime,’ as one scientist calls it, is killing larger species and sickening people.

And this only begins it. There’s Imus and the larger moonscape of mass media enabled radio war on non combatants. There’s the girlfriend promotion stunt by Paul “We’ll be Greeted as Liberators” Wolfowitz. There’s the big gorilla CO2 and it’s attendant phalanx of rising oceans, withering drought, deluge, depopulation and resource wars.
*

Vertigo sets in. I lift my eyes and find a tree-top. Perhaps that singing finch will come into view. Distracted into steadiness I recall a fine remembrance of Kurt Vonnegut, re-read it and know anew that even those in despair contribute much, and often. Then I listen to Yo Yo Ma’s Butterfly’s Day Out [click on "Play as playlist"] to lighten my gloom, and decide for the e-mail news from the capital for my daily focus.

There’s a triple play going on here:

1) White House staffers were instructed to use non-White House e-mail for certain messages. The WH says this was for campaign work since it is illegal to use government accounts (equipment/time?) for political campaigns. Others claim the accounts were used for any off-the-record communications, such as directives to get rid of certain US Attorneys. Karl Rove had at least 4 separate accounts. The Republican National Committee hosted the accounts in most cases.

2) These off-the-record communications were not revealed to the Senate Judiciary committee when it made a request for all records pertaining to the hiring and firing of the US Attorneys. Now that they have been revealed, many are claimed to be unavailable: deleted, lost, whatever.

3) A separate claim has been made by CREW that, besides the off-the-record missing e-mail, there are millions of legal, on-the-record White House e-mail that are missing.

Tied to the US Attorney scandal slowly heating, these e-mail loses — and potential recovery — could be the ball bearings which send the Administration Hummer off the road, the equivalent of the Nixon burglary — the little, stupid thing that brings the big, arrogant thing down. This is bad-news wrapped around good, methinks, not bad on bad on bad like Iraq and Oceans…

Meanwhile, the missing mail is setting up a mighty clash over Executive Privilege between the Congress and the White House. Long overdue, as the Executive Branch has used the argument of never-ending war to usurp prerogatives and hide its actions in ways Richard Nixon could only dream of, the Senate looks as if it’s ready to rumble. Mild mannered Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont seems lately to have found his inner bulldog.

Go after this Dems. Of all the places to attack, this may by the soft under-belly. Go hard, get a good grip, and don’t let go.

The best place to follow the e-mail / USAttorney typhoon is at talkingpointsmemo.com and its sister site TPMmuckraker.com

Kenneth Weiss of the LA Times is able to do what no bloggers yet can do, and only the best reporters do anymore — go on extensive fact-finding and reporting tours to bring isolated stories into one, in this case, devastating, series:

Altered Oceans: Part One: The Primeval Tide of Toxins

You can see flash movies, photos and more at the LA Times. Register. It’s worth it.