tagged w/ Green Sea Turtles
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"Government agencies don't have the data they need to accurately count populations of the six species of endangered and threatened sea turtles in the United States, says a report issued today by the National Research Council. And that will throw a wrench into ongoing efforts to figure out how badly the turtle populations that live and nest in the Gulf of Mexico have been hit by the oil spill, says report chair Karen Bjorndal, a marine biologist at the University of Florida in Gainesville who studies loggerhead and green turtles. The data gaps also hamper the government's ability to set sensible, "acceptable take" limits, the numbers of turtles deemed permissible for fishermen to accidentally catch, she says.
A first, rough estimate of the oil spill's impact will emerge when government scientists count nests next year, says a report author, Larry Crowder, a marine biologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. But if the government sticks to that method alone, they won't know the fate of this year's endangered Kemp's ridley hatchlings, which seek out floating seaweed patches in the gulf after leaving their nests in Mexico, until those hatchlings mature, up to 15 years later. "Something like a Kemp's ridley has to live for a dozen years before it becomes a statistic," he says.
"If [government agencies] had the kind of data that we tell them they should obtain, we'd be in a much better position to judge the impacts on the sea turtles in the Gulf of Mexico and the repercussions down the line," says Bjorndal."
http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2010/07/headcount-of-sea-turtles-proves-.html"Government agencies don't have the data they need to accurately count... more
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Saving nature's unborn from the Gulf oil disaster
By Kim Segal, CNN
July 9, 2010 7:50 p.m. EDT
Sea turtle eggs are packed into a cooler along with sand from the Gulf Coast beach they are leaving.
* U.S. wildlife experts are moving sea turtle eggs by hand to save them from the oil disaster
* Such a relocation effort has never been done before
* They are being taken from Florida Panhandle to Kennedy Space Center
* They will be stored in a special NASA building, then released into the Atlantic Ocean
Port St. Joe, Florida (CNN) -- One by one, with a hand as steady as a surgeon's, Lorna Patrick removes eggs from a sea turtle's nest on a Florida beach.
"If it falls, you probably killed the hatchling that's developing inside," said Patrick, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Patrick admits she holds her breath each time she takes an egg out of the sand and places it in the foam cooler.
Sand is delicately placed in the cooler between and on top of each egg. Patrick uses the sand from the nest, which is located just a few inches from the beach's surface.
This process is part of an unprecedented sea turtle relocation program. Moving sea turtle nests days before the eggs are to hatch has never been done before.
It is also the first time that wildlife experts had to deal with oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico.
"Shy of letting the hatchlings swim in oil, it's our best alternative," said Sandy MacPherson, the national sea turtle coordinator for the Fish and Wildlife Service.
"We're confident if they go into oil they're going to die."
Patrick is working on the second sea turtle nest to be moved since the program started. Ninety percent of the United States' sea turtle population can be found on Florida's beaches, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
It is estimated that 700 nests can be found in the Florida Panhandle, an area vulnerable to the oil spill.
"This is a huge relocation effort," said Thomas Strickland, assistant secretary of interior for fish and wildlife and parks. "As many as 50 to 100,000 eggs over the next six to eight weeks will be dug up."
An average nest has anywhere from 100 to 120 eggs. Sea turtles come out of the water a few feet from the coastline and lay their eggs in the warm sand.
Loggerhead turtle eggs, the type Patrick is handling, usually hatch within 60 to 70 days. The eggs are moved just over a week before they are expected to hatch.
Wildlife officials want to keep the eggs in their natural environment as long as possible.
"Through the eggs it's believed they actually connect to the landscapes where they were born," Strickland said.
Once the turtles mature it is hoped that they will return to the original nesting area and the natural birthing cycle will continue. Once Patrick's two coolers are full, with the nest's 107 eggs, they will start a journey across the state.
A special climate-controlled truck donated by Federal Express will deliver the eggs to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The coolers will be stored in a special NASA building that will be regulated to the warm summer temperatures to which the eggs are accustomed.
Instead of the beautiful white sandy beach, the hatchlings will be born in the transport coolers.
Once they break out of their shells, the warm blue Atlantic Ocean will be awaiting them.Saving nature's unborn from the Gulf oil disaster
By Kim Segal, CNN
July 9,... more
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NASA's latest mission doesn't have anything to do with spacecraft or satellites. The space agency is helping thousands of baby sea turtles make their successful pilgrimage to the ocean. Biologists are digging up some 700 turtle nests on northern Gulf beaches affected by the BP oil spill, from Panama City to Apalachicola, Florida, and relocating them to NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC) on Florida's Space Coast.
To simulate the natural environment, the eggs will be buried in damp sand inside Styrofoam coolers and transported via a temperature-controlled truck to KSC. There, they will be held and monitored at an undisclosed facility until they hatch. Once the turtles begin to break free from their shells, they will be moved quickly to nearby beaches to make their trek to the sea, where they feed exclusively along the line of Sargassum seaweed at the edge of the current. Most of the nests are made by the threatened loggerhead sea turtle, but some are possibly from three endangered species -- Kemp's ridley, leatherback, and green sea turtles. Each nest has 100-120 eggs.
Only about one in 1,000 sea turtle hatchlings typically survives to adulthood under the best conditions. Experts say that with oil right off the Gulf Coast, the turtles' odds of survival there drop to virtually zero. BP's ongoing Deepwater Horizon oil spill has released hundreds of millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico and is considered the largest offshore spill in U.S. history.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, National Marine Fisheries Service, and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission all played a role in developing the relocation plan. NASA offered to house the turtles until they hatched at its climate-controlled facilities at KSC. Although biologists can't be certain the sea turtle relocation plan will succeed, they say all of this year's hatchlings from the northern Gulf of Mexico will be lost if nothing is done.
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-07/nasa-will-rescuethousands-sea-turtle-eggs-oil-leak-areasNASA's latest mission doesn't have anything to do with spacecraft or... more
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Green Sea Turtles
Technically colorful, these toxins of ours
Rainbow sheen, blue-green to the shores
Teardrop-shaped in hues of true feelings
Day 63 oily sea, sloshings and reelings
Our hand of trust needs now to extend
Green Sea Turtles swim 'round the bend
Last seen headed east across Gulf waters
Will they live to see our sons and daughters?
Hides to seek in a Sargasso sheen
Dines on a seagrass of black gasoline
Dark paddle flippers glide and trudge
Join in the fight against BP sludgeGreen Sea Turtles
Technically colorful, these toxins of ours
Rainbow sheen,... 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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Explainer: Stopping the leak RELATED TOPICS
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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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