tagged w/ Dead Zone
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Time...
Posted by Tara Thean Tuesday, June 14, 2011 at 3:57 pm
The effects of this spring's extreme flooding of the Mississippi River have been – pardon the pun – spilling over into every possible corner of the area's residential, commercial, and agricultural life over the last two months. And it looks like the environment hasn't escaped either: researchers from the University of Michigan predict that the largest Gulf of Mexico “dead zone” on record will result from the flooding.
The dead zone is forecast to be between 8,500 and 9,421 square miles – an area roughly the size of New Hampshire, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The zone is a threat to aquatic organisms as well as the humans who depend on them in the gulf's booming seafood industry.
"Stream flows were nearly double normal during May, delivering massive amounts of nutrients to the Gulf, and that's what drives the dead zone," said Donald Scavia, Special Counsel to the U-M President for Sustainability and director of the Graham Sustainability Institute.
Scavia noted that the most likely 2011 scenario is a Gulf dead zone of at least 8,500 square miles. This estimate far surpasses the 6,000-square-mile average of the past five years, as well as the current record, set in 2002, of 8400 miles.
The oxygen-starved Gulf dead zone is largely caused by farmland runoff containing fertilizers and livestock waste from as far away as the Corn Belt. Nitrogen and phosphorus from these sources flow down the Mississippi River and into the Gulf in late spring and summer each year, prompting explosive algal blooms, which later die and sink to the ocean floor. As they decompose, the algae provide bottom-dwelling bacteria with organic matter to feast on. Oxygen is consumed in the process, producing an oxygen-starved region in bottom and near-bottom waters: a dead zone.
This year, nitrogen and phosphorus have been seeping from Mississippi and Atchafalaya Rivers into the Gulf in alarmingly high amounts. In May 2011, 164,000 metric tons of nitrogen were transported to the northern Gulf, according to the U.S. Geological Survey – a 35% climb from average May nitrogen estimates in the last 32 years. The Gulf has seen a shocking 300% increase in nitrogen content since 1960.
Increased stream-flow rates and agricultural runoff are the main culprits, Scavia said.
"Yes, the floodwaters really matter, but the fact that there's so much more nitrogen in the system now than there was back in the '60s is the real issue," he explained.
Scavia called the growth of the Gulf dead zones an “ecological time bomb.”
"Without determined local, regional and national efforts to control them, we are putting major fisheries at risk,” he said.
Gulf fisheries recorded a high dockside value of $629 million in 2009, and nearly 3 million recreational fishers – who took 22 million fishing trips – contributed a further $1 billion to the Gulf economy. The Gulf of Mexico/Mississippi River Watershed Nutrient Task Force aims to reduce the size of the dead zone to around 1,900 square miles.
Nutrient load models can be complicated by short-term weather patterns moving water masses or mixing up the water column, say researchers at Louisiana State University.
But that doesn't mean we shouldn't be worried. "While there is some uncertainty regarding the size, position and timing of this year's hypoxic zone in the Gulf, the forecast models are in overall agreement that hypoxia will be larger than we have typically seen in recent years," NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco said in a statement.
Gulf Restoration Network Director of Science and Water Policy Matt Rota is frustrated with the EPA's handling of the expanding dead zone, which he calls “another harsh reminder that our country must work aggressively to clean up the Mississippi River.”
“The EPA must stop dragging its feet in addressing the Dead Zone,” he said, explaining that the Gulf Restoration Network petitioned EPA to address the Dead Zone in 2008. “Almost three years later, the EPA still hasn't responded to this petition, and the Dead Zone continues to plague the Gulf impacting wildlife and coastal communities.”
The actual—as opposed to estimated—size of the 2011 Gulf dead zone will be released after a NOAA-supported monitoring survey led by the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium between July 25 and August 2.
Read more: http://ecocentric.blogs.time.com/2011/06/14/scientists-predict-record-gulf-of-mexico-dead-zone-due-to-mississippi-flooding/#ixzz1PQ6t1opFTime...
Posted by Tara Thean Tuesday, June 14, 2011 at 3:57 pm
The effects... more
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For the first time, federal scientists have found damage to deep sea coral and other marine life on the ocean floor several miles from the blown-out BP well — a strong indication that damage from the spill could be significantly greater than officials had previously acknowledged.
Tests are needed to verify that the coral died from oil that spewed into the Gulf of Mexico after the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion, but the chief scientist who led the government-funded expedition said Friday he was convinced it was related.
"What we have at this point is the smoking gun," said Charles Fisher, a biologist with Penn State University who led the expedition aboard the Ronald Brown, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration research vessel.
"There is an abundance of circumstantial data that suggests that what happened is related to the recent oil spill," Fisher said.
For the government, the findings were a departure from earlier statements. Until now, federal teams have painted relatively rosy pictures about the spill's effect on the sea and its ecosystem, saying they had not found any damage on the ocean floor.
In early August, a federal report said that nearly 70 percent of the 170 million gallons of oil that gushed from the well into the sea had dissolved naturally, or was burned, skimmed, dispersed or captured, with almost nothing left to see — at least on top of the water. The report was blasted by scientists.
Most of the Gulf's bottom is muddy, but coral colonies that pop up every once in a while are vital oases for marine life in the chilly ocean depths.
Coral is essential to the Gulf because it provides a habitat for fish and other organisms such as snails and crabs, making any large-scale death of coral a problem for many species. It might need years, or even decades, to grow back.
"It's cold on the bottom, and things don't grow as quickly," said Paul Montagna, a marine scientist at the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies at Texas A&M University in Corpus Christi. He was not on the expedition.
Montagna said the affected area is so large, and scientists' ability to explore it with underwater robots so limited that "we'll never be able to see everything that happened down there."
Using a robot called Jason II, researchers found the dead coral in an area measuring up to 130 feet by 50 feet, about 4,600 feet under the surface.
"These kinds of coral are normally beautiful, brightly colored," Fisher said. "What you saw was a field of brown corals with exposed skeleton — white, brittle stars tightly wound around the skeleton, not waving their arms like they usually do."
Fisher described the soft and hard coral they found seven miles southwest of the well as an underwater graveyard. He said oil probably passed over the coral and killed it.
The coral has "been dying for months," he said. "What we are looking at is a combination of dead gooey tissues and sediment. Gunk is a good word for what it is."
Eric Cordes, a Temple University marine scientist on the expedition, said his colleagues have identified about 25 other sites in the vicinity of the well where similar damage may have occurred. An expedition is planned for next month to explore those sites.
When coral is threatened, its first reaction is to release large amounts of mucus, "and anything drifting by in the water column would get bound up in this mucus," Cordes said. "And that is what this (brown) substance would be: A variety of things bound up in the mucus."
About 90 percent of the large coral was damaged, Fisher said.
The expedition was funded by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The mission was part of a four-year study of the Gulf's depths, but it was expanded this year to look at oil spill damage.
In a statement released Thursday night, NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco said the expedition underscored that the damage to marine life from the oil spill is "not easily seen." She added that more research was needed to gain a "comprehensive understanding of impacts to the Gulf."
"Given the toxic nature of oil, and the unprecedented amount of oil spilled, it would be surprising if we did not find damage," she said.
NOAA did not provide any officials or scientists of its own who went on the expedition. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management said its researcher on the expedition was unavailable.
Cordes said that the expedition did not find dramatic visual evidence of coral damage in other sites north of the well. But he said it was premature to say coral elsewhere in the Gulf was not damaged.
The new findings, though, could mean long-term trouble for the coral southwest of the well, where computer models and research cruises mapped much of the deepwater oil.
Referring to one type of coral known as "gorgonians," Cordes said he had never seen them "come back from having lost so much tissue. It would have to be re-colonization from scratch."
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On The Web:
Photos of the dead coral: http://www.science.psu.edu/alert/photos/research-photos/biology/fisher-photos/
More about the NOAA expedition: http://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/explorations/10lophelia/welcome.htmlFor the first time, federal scientists have found damage to deep sea coral and other... more
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Gulf of Mexico - COASTAL AREA - A marine scientist says underwater oil plumes are reducing oxygen in parts of the Gulf.
But the drop-off is not enough to endanger marine life just yet.
Water samples show oxygen concentrations are dropping one to two percent a day.
At that rate -- it would take months for levels to become hazardous for fish and other animals.
Scientists fear the effect could create "Dead Zones" in the water -- with so little oxygen that virtually nothing could survive.
http://www.weartv.com/newsroom/top_stories/videos/wear_vid_9102.shtmlGulf of Mexico - COASTAL AREA - A marine scientist says underwater oil plumes are... more
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Photo: Crews worked Saturday on the failed top kill effort to stanch the leaking oil well in the Gulf of Mexico. BP will try another strategy.
May 29, 2010
BP Prepares to Take New Tack on Leak After ‘Top Kill’ Fails
By LESLIE KAUFMAN and CLIFFORD KRAUSS
NEW ORLEANS — In another serious setback in the effort to stem the flow of oil gushing from a well a mile beneath the Gulf of Mexico, BP engineers said Saturday that the “top kill” technique had failed and, after consultation with government officials, they had decided to move on to another strategy.
Doug Suttles, BP’s chief operating officer for exploration and production, said at a news conference that the engineers would try once again to solve the problem with a containment cap and that it could take four to seven days for the device to be in place.
“After three full days of attempting top kill, we now believe it is time to move on to the next of our options,” Mr. Suttles said.
The abandonment of the top kill technique, the most ambitious effort yet to plug the well, was the latest in a series of failures. First, BP failed in efforts to repair a blowout preventer with submarine robots. Then its initial efforts to cap the well with a containment dome failed when it became clogged with a frothy mix of frigid water and gas. Efforts to use a hose to gather escaping oil have managed to catch only a fraction of the spill.
BP has started work on two relief wells, but officials have said that they will not be completed until August — further contributing to what is already the worst oil spill in United States history.
The latest failure will undoubtedly put more pressure — both politically and from the public — on the Obama administration to take some sort of action, perhaps taking control of the repair effort completely from BP.
President Obama, who is spending the Memorial Day weekend in Chicago, issued a statement Saturday evening on the decision to abandon the top kill.
“While we initially received optimistic reports about the procedure, it is now clear that it has not worked,” Mr. Obama said.
He said that Rear Adm. Mary E. Landry of the Coast Guard had “directed BP to launch a new procedure whereby the riser pipe will be cut and a containment structure fitted over the leak.”
“This approach is not without risk and has never been attempted before at this depth,” Mr. Obama said. “That is why it was not activated until other methods had been exhausted.”
The president continued, “We will continue to pursue any and all responsible means of stopping this leak until the completion of the two relief wells currently being drilled.”
For BP, the besieged British company, the failure could mean billions of dollars of additional liabilities, as the spill potentially worsens in the weeks and months ahead.
“I am disappointed that this operation did not work,” Tony Hayward, chief executive of BP, said in a statement. “We remain committed to doing everything we can to make this situation right.”
A technician who has been working on the project to stem the oil leak said Saturday that neither the top kill nor the “junk shot” came close to succeeding because the pressure of oil and gas escaping from the well was simply too powerful to overcome. He added that engineers never had a complete enough understanding of the inner workings of drill pipe casing or blowout preventer mechanisms to make the efforts work.
“Simply too much of what we pumped in was escaping,” said the technician, who spoke on condition of remaining unnamed because he is not authorized to speak publicly for the company.
“The engineers are disappointed, and management is upset,” said the technician. “Nothing is good, nothing is good.”
The spill began after the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded on April 20, killing 11 people. Since then, it has dumped an estimated 18 million to 40 million gallons into the gulf.
After the announcement Saturday, the disappointment was palpable along the Louisiana shoreline, where the oil has increasingly washed up in sticky, rusty globs.
Michel Claudet, the president of Terrebonne Parish, 60 miles southwest of New Orleans, said that when he heard the news, he felt “sorrow, despair and like this ordeal will never finish. If you go around the parish, it is all our folks talk about.”
Mr. Claudet said that he was trying to remain hopeful, but that it was increasingly difficult. “As every item fails,” he said, “I am less and less optimistic.”
In New Orleans, Margaret Shockey, 67, a retired teacher, said, “One thing’s for sure, this is the last city that deserved this.”
Last week, BP described the top kill — which was an effort to pump heavy mud into the well to counter the flow of oil — as its best hope for stopping the spill. During the course of the operation, BP officials had often expressed optimism that it would work.
But on Saturday, Mr. Suttles said the operation had pumped 30,000 barrels of mud into the well and yet failed to stop it from flowing.
Admiral Landry called the failure “very disappointing.”
The new strategy is to smoothly cut the riser from which the oil is leaking and then place a cap over it. Pipes attached to the cap would take the oil to a storage boat on the surface.
Though a first effort at a containment dome failed, Mr. Suttles said BP had learned from that experience and now believed that this cap, which is custom fitted to the riser, would be more successful.
He said it would capture most but not all of the oil leaking from the well, which is believed to be gushing 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day.
He would not give odds for the operation’s success, but said he had “a lot of confidence” that it would work.
Earlier in the day, Mr. Suttles said preparations for such an alternative plan were already under way, just in case. “That equipment is on stage and ready to go,” he said. Equipment is being deployed on land and on the seabed, he said.
If the new cap is not successful, the company has said it will look into attaching another blowout preventer to the one that already exists at the wellhead and has not functioned.
But officials emphasized that the real solution to the spill was the relief well. They said one of the relief wells was currently proceeding ahead of schedule, but was still at least a month away.
“It’s like a bad movie that just won’t end,” said Billy Altman, 45, a mechanic in New Orleans. “You know, you think they finally killed the bad guy, and then he comes back to life. It’s crazy.”
Clifford Krauss reported from Houston, and Leslie Kaufman from New Orleans. Robbie Brown contributed from New Orleans, and Sarah Wheaton from New York.Photo: Crews worked Saturday on the failed top kill effort to stanch the leaking oil... more
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BP's "top kill" attempt to stop the flow of oil from a ruptured well in the Gulf of Mexico failed, the company's chief operating officer said Saturday.
The oil giant has tried for days to stop the the largest oil spill in U.S. history by pumping heavy, mudlike drilling fluid into a ruptured oil well, a method known as "top kill."
The next option is to place a custom-built cap known as the "lower marine riser package" over the leak, the company's chief operating officer, Doug Suttles said. BP crews were working Saturday to ready the materials for that option should it become necessary, he said.
"We've been prepping that all along in case we need to move to that option," he said. "People want to know which technique is going to work, and I don't know."
And if "lower marine riser package" were to fail, he said, BP engineers would try placing a second blowout preventer on top of the first, which failed to cut of the oil flow after the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig. The failed blowout preventer is a 48-foot-tall, 450-ton apparatus that sits atop the well 5,000 feet underwater.
Meanwhile, teams in Louisiana were working Saturday on a clean-up project aimed at protecting coastal marshes while BP continues its efforts to stop oil from gushing into the Gulf of Mexico.
Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser has said that machines would suck oil out of marshes Saturday after crews determined where to deploy them.
Video: Fishermen woes
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"We will begin to clean up some of those areas that fell by the wayside for the last couple weeks," he said.
Oil giant BP's focus has been trying to put a stop to what officials say is the largest oil spill in U.S. history, with as many as 19,000 barrels of crude gushing into the ocean daily.
By Sunday morning the company could know whether the "top kill" procedure -- pumping heavy drilling mud into the breached oil well at high pressure -- is working, said Robert Dudley, BP's managing director.
"It's like an arm-wrestling match of two equally strong forces," he said.
Government scientists on Thursday said as many as 19,000 barrels (798,000 gallons) of oil were spewing into the ocean every day, making this disaster perhaps twice the size of the Exxon Valdez incident.
Previously, BP officials and government scientists had said 5,000 barrels (210,000 gallons) of crude were flowing out daily.
"This is clearly an environmental catastrophe," BP CEO Tony Hayward said Friday. "There's no two ways about it."
Under intense political pressure to take control of the situation, President Obama toured the region on Friday.
"We want to stop the leak, we want to contain and clean up the oil and we want to help the people in this region return to their lives and livelihoods as soon as possible," the president told reporters.
About 25 percent of the Gulf of Mexico exclusive economic zone has been put off limits, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and fishermen are worried the gushing oil will take a more serious toll than Hurricane Katrina did in 2005.
"Katrina was nothing but rain, water and wind. This is poison. It's gas," oysterman Arthur Etienne said.
Obama said Friday that federal officials were prepared to authorize moving forward with "a portion of" an idea proposed by local officials, who want the Army Corps of Engineers to build a "sand boom" offshore to keep the water from getting into the fragile marshlands.
That did not satisfy Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who has advocated immediate construction of the booms. Noting in a written statement that 107 miles of the state's coast have been oiled, he said, "We continue to ask federal officials to approve our entire sand-boom plan from the northern Chandeleurs to the Isle Dernieres chain."
Obama said he has directed federal officials to triple the manpower in places where oil has hit shore or appears within a day of doing so.BP's "top kill" attempt to stop the flow of oil from a ruptured well in... more
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Nick Pozzi, a former oil pipeline engineering and operations project manager is puzzled why BP did not salvage perfectly good crude oil for later sale, and to thereby protect marine and wildlife.
What Mr. Pozzi does not know is the oil companies are owned by the world’s only legal counterfeiters – the International Monetary/Banking Cartel – who can “print” all the money they want, so making money on Gulf oil was not important to them. Killing the Gulf of Mexico, apparently, is important to them, for their own cryptic and esoteric reasons.
If the Cartel had wanted to save marine life, any oil they had not vacuumed up could have been mulched with any number of non-toxic materials, such as “Oil Sponge,” a name trademarked by Phase III, Inc.
Rated as the “best performing” absorbent by the US Army Corp of Engineers, Oil Sponge is 100% organic, and is made from renewable resources.
Oil Sponge is built using a microbial and nutrient package, capable of transforming oil hydrocarbons into a safe bi-product of carbon dioxide and water.
But, the governmental bureaucrats of the Obama administration, and the Cartel’s oil executives, had no interest in using an environmentally friendly product to clean up what is the greatest man-made environmental disaster of all time … they seemed intent on making this unbelievable cataclysm far, far worse, and one that could never be cleaned up.
It cannot yet be proven that the Monetary Cartel purposely blew up their own wellhead, but the crimes they have committed in their so-called “clean-up” efforts are well documented, in spite of no corporate media outrage. Well, of course not, the Cartel that owns the oil companies also own their corporate media.
After the Exxon Valdez incident of March 1989, Mycelx of Georgia developed what looks like a paper towel to soak up to 50 times its weight in oil. And while this product is used from the Middle East to Europe to Canada it was of no interest to the parties Obama charged with cleaning up the Gulf of the floating oil those very same parties caused.
Then there is the AmeriHaz Petroleum Solidifier that encapsulates environmental contaminants, making crude oil and other oil like substances easy to retrieve, which also proved to be of no interest to the Cartel.
Even hair naturally separates oil from water, leaving large tar globs, in which mushrooms can then be seeded. And as the mushrooms grow, they digest the oil, leaving non-toxic organics, which can then be composed into soil, great for growing healthy vegetables.
Anyone who has ever had a bad hair day knows how well hair will retain oil. In fact, Lisa Gautier, president of Matter of Fact (website for hair salons) has collected 400,000 pounds of hair, and stuffed it all into nylons to be used as booms near Gulf shores.
This idea could have been a shot in the arm of our dying economy, by creating organic compose for the millions of nutrient depleted farm acres in the world. Also there could have been a viable cottage industry of collecting hair from salons.
And, hair is certainly a renewable resource, with most of us contributing. But neither Obama or the Cartel has done anything for our dying US and world economy, but ensure it dies, while feebly pretending to resuscitate it.
And now that they’ve probably destroyed the tourist, shrimping, and fishing industries along the Gulf Coast, we’ll be hearing about more “stimulus packages” that will make what money we do have even more worthless as it enriches the Cartel’s Wall Street.
But in the world of what could have been, there’s hay, sawdust, crushed volcanic rock, sheep’s wool, and even kitty litter that could have mulched with the oil on the surface of the Gulf waters, making for easy pick-up.
But, oil industry executives and their confederates in the Obama administration quickly made sure that all spewing oil would either sink well below the surface, or never rise to it, with over half a million gallons of their dispersants. Now the oil that’s been gushing for weeks can never be vacuumed up or safely neutralized.
continued.Nick Pozzi, a former oil pipeline engineering and operations project manager is... more
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If being bombarded with oil from below and chemical dispersants from above weren't enough, the Gulf of Mexico also has to endure marketing rhetoric from a long-time tormentor: the corn industry.
Industrial corn production is indisputably linked to the massive hypoxic "dead zone" that emerges in the Gulf every year. According to a 2008 peer-reviewed paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, "Nitrogen leaching from fertilized corn fields to the Mississippi-Atchafalaya River system is a primary cause of the bottom-water hypoxia that develops on the continental shelf of the northern Gulf of Mexico each summer." And as corn production ramps up to satisfy government ethanol mandates, the amount of nitrogen flowing into the Gulf will likely increase by between 10 and 34 percent by 2022, the report states. That surging nitrogen load will make it "nearly impossible" to slow the growth of the already New Jersey-sized dead zone, the report concludes.
Meanwhile, how the Gulf's two ecological calamities--the spill and the dead zone--will interact is anyone's guess. Early indications are not encouraging, reports the Minnesota Post.
So you might expect the corn shills to maintain a respectful silence as BP's oil disaster unfolds. Instead, the corn industry is ludicrously presenting itself as the Gulf's salvation.
From the Nebraska Corn Board:
As those along the Gulf Coast work tirelessly to manage a disaster due to an offshore oil drilling accident, this tragic situation provides even greater impetus for others to move the ball forward on renewable fuels.
Um, Gulf? It's the Corn Board calling. The guys who brought you the dead zone, pictured above, claim they have the answer to your troubles.
NASAA Corn Board functionary added: "Those green fields [in the Midwest] are a tremendous reminder of the potential and promise of renewable fuels like corn ethanol, and will stand in stark contrast to the images we'll see from the Gulf ... It is renewable, very safe for the environment and does not have the lingering and environmentally damaging impact of oil."
(How can a "renewable fuel" command up such titantic amounts of nitrogen synthesized from natural gas and mined phosphorous -- so much of which ends up in the Gulf?)
continuedIf being bombarded with oil from below and chemical dispersants from above... more
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There is an important nexus between water and global warming. The very energy sources that emit greenhouse gases or cause deadly pollution, also damage our water, our ecosystems and all the life on earth that depends on water.There is an important nexus between water and global warming. The very energy sources... more
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"Oxygen-starved dead zones have been appearing with increasing frequency around the world, with some 400 identified so far. While most are caused by sewage or fertilizer leaching into the ocean, a possible new driver has appeared in the northwest Pacific: climate change.""Oxygen-starved dead zones have been appearing with increasing frequency around... more
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