by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jun 21, 2012 | Mining & Drilling, Toxification
By Agence France-Presse
The US government offered up new areas of the central Gulf of Mexico for drilling for the first time since the 2010 BP oil spill and received $1.7 billion in winning bids, officials said Wednesday.
Environmental groups tried to block the long-awaited sale by filing a lawsuit Tuesday arguing that it will endanger the already damaged ecosystem.
“The government is gambling with the Gulf by encouraging even more offshore drilling in the same exceedingly deep waters that have already proven to be treacherous, rather than investing in safer clean energy that creates jobs without risking lives and livelihoods,” said Jacqueline Savitz, vice president for North America at Oceana, one of five groups filing suit.
“This move sets us up for another disastrous oil spill, threatening more human lives, livelihoods, industries and marine life, including endangered species, in the greedy rush to expand offshore drilling.”
The Obama administration said it conducted a “rigorous analysis” of the impact of the 2010 spill prior to opening up new areas to leasing as part of a plan to expand “safe and responsible” domestic production.
“This sale, part of the president’s all-of-the-above energy strategy, is good news for American jobs, good news for the Gulf economy, and will bring additional domestic resources to market,” Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar said in a statement.
Officials estimate that energy companies will be able to recover between 800 million and 1.6 billion barrels of oil and 3.3 to 6.6 trillion cubic feet of natural gas if the tracts are fully developed.
The Interior Department had offered more than 39 million acres of new tracts ranging from three to more than 230 miles (give to 370 kilometers off the coasts of Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi in depths ranging from 10 to more than 11,200 feet (3 to 3,400 meters).
It received winning bids on 2.4 million acres.
The sale comes six months after the government opened up 21 million acres — an area about the size of South Carolina — in the western Gulf of Mexico and received $337 million in winning bids for over a million acres off the coast of Texas.
The April 20, 2010 explosion on the BP-leased Deepwater Horizon drilling rig killed 11 workers, blackened beaches in five US states and devastated the Gulf Coast’s tourism and fishing industries.
It took 87 days to cap BP’s runaway well 5,000 feet (1,500 meters) below the surface that spewed some 4.9 million barrels (206 million gallons) of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.
From PhysOrg: http://phys.org/news/2012-06-areas-gulf-mexico-drilling.html
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jun 18, 2012 | Agriculture, Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Toxification
By Dahr Jamail / Al Jazeera
A drumbeat of recent scientific studies emphasises an increasingly alarming convergence of crises for Earth’s oceans.
The amount of plastic floating in the Pacific Gyre – a massive swirling vortex of rubbish – has increased 100-fold in the past four decades, phytoplankton counts are dropping, over-fishing is causing dramatic decreases in fish populations, decreasing ocean salinity is intensifying weather extremes, and warming oceans are speeding up Antarctic melting.
One warning of humanity’s increasingly deleterious impact on the oceans came from prominent marine biologist Jeremy Jackson of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography.
In a 2008 article published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Jackson warned that, without profound and prompt changes in human behaviour, we will cause a “mass extinction in the oceans with unknown ecological and evolutionary consequences”.
The statement might sound extreme, until one considers what science journalist Alanna Mitchell has written about the oceans: “Every tear you cry … ends up back in the ocean system. Every third molecule of carbon dioxide you exhale is absorbed into the ocean. Every second breath you take comes from the oxygen produced by plankton.”
These and other issues will be discussed at the Rio 20 United Nations Conference on Sustainability, which will be held between June 20 and 22 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
But marine biologists, oceanographers, and others who study the seas are telling Al Jazeera of the deepening impact humans are having on the oceans, and, from what they are saying, now is the time to listen.
Plastic, plastic everywhere…
The most obvious impact humans are having on the world’s oceans is pollution. Though it can take myriad forms, pollution is now most shockingly evident in the seas in the form of giant, swirling gyres of plastic.
Scientists recently investigated the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, known as the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch”, and found an “alarming amount” of refuse, much of it comprising individual pieces of very small size. The eastern section of the spiralling mass, between Hawaii and California, is estimated to be around twice the size of Texas, and is having ecosystem-wide impacts, according to their study released May 8.
Miriam Goldstein, a graduate student researcher at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at University of California San Diego, and the lead author of the study, told Al Jazeera that by adding this amount of plastic to the oceans, humans could be causing large-scale change to the ocean’s ecological system.
“We found eggs on the pieces of plastic, and these were sea-skater [insect] eggs,” Goldstein said. “Sea skaters naturally occur in the gyre and are known to lay their eggs on floating objects. So we found that the amount of eggs being laid had increased with the amount of plastic.”
Goldstein is also concerned by the findings because, “Our work shows there could be potential effects to the ocean ecosystem that we can’t expect or predict. There are five subtropical gyres, one in each ocean basin, and they are natural currents. They are vast areas of the oceans; together they comprise the majority of the area of the oceans. So altering them on a large scale could have unexpected results on all kinds of things.”
The study shows how an increase in pollution, in this case an immense amount of plastic, may have dire consequences for animals across the entire marine food web.
This Scripps study follows another report by colleagues at the institution that showed nine per cent of the fish collected during the trip to study the gyre had plastic waste in their stomachs.
Published in Marine Ecology Progress Series, that study estimated that fish at intermediate ocean depths in the North Pacific Ocean could be ingesting plastic at the staggering rate of 12,000 to 24,000 tonnes per year.
Dr Wallace J Nichols, a research associate at the California Academy of Sciences, told Al Jazeera he finds plastic on every beach he visits across the globe, and added, “Probably every sea turtle on the planet interacts with plastic at some point in its life.”
Jo Royle, a trans-ocean skipper and ocean advocate, has seen the same.
“For 13 years I’ve been crossing oceans,” she told Al Jazeera. “I’ve seen plastic on the coastline of Antarctica, and over the years we’ve noticed plastic becoming more of an issue on remote islands. Over the last seven years we’ve seen it increase dramatically. I can’t remember the last time I’ve been on a beach and not seen plastic.”
Biological oceanographer Dr Debora Iglesias-Rodriguez, with the National Oceanography Centre at Britain’s University of Southampton, is also concerned.
“Marine pollution is a big issue,” she told Al Jazeera. “There is this idea that oceans have unlimited inertia, but nano-particles of plastic getting into marine animals and the food chain are affecting fish fertility rates, and this affects food security and coastal populations. Pollution is having a huge impact on the oceans, and is urgent and needs to be dealt with.”
Dead zones
Another phenomenon afflicting Earth’s oceans are “dead zones”.
While these can be formed by natural causes, climate change, along with human activities and industrial waste, have greatly aggravated the situation.
The US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration released a study showing that rising global temperatures cause oceans to warm, which translates into a decreased capacity to hold oxygen.
The excessive use by industrial agriculture of chemical fertilisers containing phosphorus and nitrogen is the other key factor, since these chemicals encourage the increased development of algae – starving other marine life of oxygen.
The world’s second-largest and most heavily studied human-caused coastal dead zone is in the Gulf of Mexico, a zone caused by massive amounts of the aforementioned chemicals, along with other sources of nitrogen from animal feed, sewage treatment plants, and urban runoff from the Mississippi River flowing into the Gulf.
“All this pollution flows down and in the summer causes huge algae blooms,” Matt Rota, Science and Water Policy Director for the Gulf Restoration Network, told Al Jazeera. “These algae then die and sink to the bottom, where bacteria eat them and deplete the water of oxygen. And the water can’t mix to get more oxygen into it, so sea life suffocates and dies if it’s unable to swim away.”
The Gulf of Mexico dead zone varies in size and shape, but has been steadily increasing in size since it was first measured at 9,774 sq km in 1985. It forms annually at the mouth of the Mississippi River, and spans an area that encompasses the entire coast of Louisiana, and over to Texas.
Read more from Al Jazeera: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2012/06/20126681156629735.html
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | May 2, 2012 | Mining & Drilling
By Rupert Neate / The Guardian
BP is planning to start three new oil drilling rigs in the Gulf of Mexico this year. The launch of the new rigs will bring the number of BP rigs in the Gulf to eight – more than the oil giant had before the devastating Deepwater Horizon disaster three years ago.
Bernard Looney, BP’s executive in charge of new wells, said BP is expecting to spend $4bn (£2.5bn) on new developments in the Gulf of Mexico this year and hopes to “invest at least that much every year over the next decade”.
“After much soul-searching in the fall of 2010, we concluded it would be wrong to walk away [from the Gulf of Mexico],” Looney said at an offshore oil conference in Houston, Texas, on Monday. “We would have been walking away not only from our past, but from a key component of our future.”
He said the Deepwater Horizon disaster, which killed 11 people, had “challenged us to the core”, but said the company has been working hard to help prevent “such an accident from ever happening again”.
While conceding that BP was in “absolutely no position to preach”, he called on the industry to adopt broader safety standards.
Last October US regulators granted BP its first permit to drill a new well since the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, that spewed 4.9m barrels of oil into the fragile Gulf of Mexico ecosystem. The permit, for drilling in BP’s Kaskida field 250 miles south-west of New Orleans, was approved after BP’s well design met more stringent post-spill standards.
Looney did not state where the new rigs will drill, but industry figures said they expect an appraisal well in BP’s “giant” Tiber field 250 miles south-west of New Orleans. BP has long wanted to explore the area it discovered in 2009, but had been banned by regulators.
The company’s next big project, Mad Dog phase 2, is expected to start production towards the end of the decade. Looney said the field, which was discovered in 1998 and first began producing oil in 2005, holds more than 4bn barrels of oil – enough to promote it to the “super-giant” oil field category.
From The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/apr/30/bp-new-gulf-mexico-oil-rigs
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Apr 18, 2012 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Toxification
By Dahr Jamail / Al Jazeera
“The fishermen have never seen anything like this,” Dr Jim Cowan told Al Jazeera. “And in my 20 years working on red snapper, looking at somewhere between 20 and 30,000 fish, I’ve never seen anything like this either.”
Dr Cowan, with Louisiana State University’s Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences started hearing about fish with sores and lesions from fishermen in November 2010.
Cowan’s findings replicate those of others living along vast areas of the Gulf Coast that have been impacted by BP’s oil and dispersants.
Gulf of Mexico fishermen, scientists and seafood processors have told Al Jazeera they are finding disturbing numbers of mutated shrimp, crab and fish that they believe are deformed by chemicals released during BP’s 2010 oil disaster.
Along with collapsing fisheries, signs of malignant impact on the regional ecosystem are ominous: horribly mutated shrimp, fish with oozing sores, underdeveloped blue crabs lacking claws, eyeless crabs and shrimp – and interviewees’ fingers point towards BP’s oil pollution disaster as being the cause.
Eyeless shrimp
Tracy Kuhns and her husband Mike Roberts, commercial fishers from Barataria, Louisiana, are finding eyeless shrimp.
“At the height of the last white shrimp season, in September, one of our friends caught 400 pounds of these,” Kuhns told Al Jazeera while showing a sample of the eyeless shrimp.
According to Kuhns, at least 50 per cent of the shrimp caught in that period in Barataria Bay, a popular shrimping area that was heavily impacted by BP’s oil and dispersants, were eyeless. Kuhns added: “Disturbingly, not only do the shrimp lack eyes, they even lack eye sockets.”
“Some shrimpers are catching these out in the open Gulf [of Mexico],” she added, “They are also catching them in Alabama and Mississippi. We are also finding eyeless crabs, crabs with their shells soft instead of hard, full grown crabs that are one-fifth their normal size, clawless crabs, and crabs with shells that don’t have their usual spikes … they look like they’ve been burned off by chemicals.”
On April 20, 2010, BP’s Deepwater Horizon oilrig exploded, and began the release of at least 4.9 million barrels of oil. BP then used at least 1.9 million gallons of toxic Corexit dispersants to sink the oil.
Keath Ladner, a third generation seafood processor in Hancock County, Mississippi, is also disturbed by what he is seeing.
“I’ve seen the brown shrimp catch drop by two-thirds, and so far the white shrimp have been wiped out,” Ladner told Al Jazeera. “The shrimp are immune compromised. We are finding shrimp with tumors on their heads, and are seeing this everyday.”
While on a shrimp boat in Mobile Bay with Sidney Schwartz, the fourth-generation fisherman said that he had seen shrimp with defects on their gills, and “their shells missing around their gills and head”.
“We’ve fished here all our lives and have never seen anything like this,” he added.
Ladner has also seen crates of blue crabs, all of which were lacking at least one of their claws.
Darla Rooks, a lifelong fisherperson from Port Sulfur, Louisiana, told Al Jazeera she is finding crabs “with holes in their shells, shells with all the points burned off so all the spikes on their shells and claws are gone, misshapen shells, and crabs that are dying from within … they are still alive, but you open them up and they smell like they’ve been dead for a week”.
Rooks is also finding eyeless shrimp, shrimp with abnormal growths, female shrimp with their babies still attached to them, and shrimp with oiled gills.
“We also seeing eyeless fish, and fish lacking even eye-sockets, and fish with lesions, fish without covers over their gills, and others with large pink masses hanging off their eyes and gills.”
Rooks, who grew up fishing with her parents, said she had never seen such things in these waters, and her seafood catch last year was “ten per cent what it normally is”.
“I’ve never seen this,” he said, a statement Al Jazeera heard from every scientist, fisherman, and seafood processor we spoke with about the seafood deformities.
Given that the Gulf of Mexico provides more than 40 per cent of all the seafood caught in the continental US, this phenomenon does not bode well for the region, or the country.
BP’s chemicals?
“The dispersants used in BP’s draconian experiment contain solvents, such as petroleum distillates and 2-butoxyethanol. Solvents dissolve oil, grease, and rubber,” Dr Riki Ott, a toxicologist, marine biologist and Exxon Valdez survivor told Al Jazeera. “It should be no surprise that solvents are also notoriously toxic to people, something the medical community has long known”.
The dispersants are known to be mutagenic, a disturbing fact that could be evidenced in the seafood deformities. Shrimp, for example, have a life-cycle short enough that two to three generations have existed since BP’s disaster began, giving the chemicals time to enter the genome.
Pathways of exposure to the dispersants are inhalation, ingestion, skin, and eye contact. Health impacts can include headaches, vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pains, chest pains, respiratory system damage, skin sensitisation, hypertension, central nervous system depression, neurotoxic effects, cardiac arrhythmia and cardiovascular damage. They are also teratogenic – able to disturb the growth and development of an embryo or fetus – and carcinogenic.
Cowan believes chemicals named polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), released from BP’s submerged oil, are likely to blame for what he is finding, due to the fact that the fish with lesions he is finding are from “a wide spatial distribution that is spatially coordinated with oil from the Deepwater Horizon, both surface oil and subsurface oil. A lot of the oil that impacted Louisiana was also in subsurface plumes, and we think there is a lot of it remaining on the seafloor”.
Marine scientist Samantha Joye of the University of Georgia published results of her submarine dives around the source area of BP’s oil disaster in the Nature Geoscience journal.
Her evidence showed massive swathes of oil covering the seafloor, including photos of oil-covered bottom dwelling sea creatures.
While showing slides at an American Association for the Advancement of Science annual conference in Washington, Joye said: “This is Macondo oil on the bottom. These are dead organisms because of oil being deposited on their heads.”
Dr Wilma Subra, a chemist and Macarthur Fellow, has conducted tests on seafood and sediment samples along the Gulf for chemicals present in BP’s crude oil and toxic dispersants.
“Tests have shown significant levels of oil pollution in oysters and crabs along the Louisiana coastline,” Subra told Al Jazeera. “We have also found high levels of hydrocarbons in the soil and vegetation.”
According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, PAHs “are a group of semi-volatile organic compounds that are present in crude oil that has spent time in the ocean and eventually reaches shore, and can be formed when oil is burned”.
“The fish are being exposed to PAHs, and I was able to find several references that list the same symptoms in fish after the Exxon Valdez spill, as well as other lab experiments,” explained Cowan. “There was also a paper published by some LSU scientists that PAH exposure has effects on the genome.”
The University of South Florida released the results of a survey whose findings corresponded with Cowan’s: a two to five per cent infection rate in the same oil impact areas, and not just with red snapper, but with more than 20 species of fish with lesions. In many locations, 20 per cent of the fish had lesions, and later sampling expeditions found areas where, alarmingly, 50 per cent of the fish had them.
“I asked a NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] sampler what percentage of fish they find with sores prior to 2010, and it’s one tenth of one percent,” Cowan said. “Which is what we found prior to 2010 as well. But nothing like we’ve seen with these secondary infections and at this high of rate since the spill.”
“What we think is that it’s attributable to chronic exposure to PAHs released in the process of weathering of oil on the seafloor,” Cowan said. “There’s no other thing we can use to explain this phenomenon. We’ve never seen anything like this before.”
Read more from Al Jazeera: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2012/04/201241682318260912.html
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Mar 31, 2012 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Toxification
By Peter Beaumont / The Guardian
A new study of dolphins living close to the site of North America’s worst ever oil spill – the BP Deepwater Horizon catastrophe two years ago – has established serious health problems afflicting the marine mammals.
The report, commissioned by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration [NOAA], found that many of the 32 dolphins studied were underweight, anaemic and suffering from lung and liver disease, while nearly half had low levels of a hormone that helps the mammals deal with stress as well as regulating their metabolism and immune systems.
More than 200m gallons of crude oil flowed from the well after a series of explosions on 20 April 2010, which killed 11 workers. The spill contaminated the Gulf of Mexico and its coastline in what President Barack Obama called America’s worst environmental disaster.
The research follows the publication of several scientific studies into insect populations on the nearby Gulf coastline and into the health of deepwater coral populations, which all suggest that the environmental impact of the five-month long spill may have been far worse than previously appreciated.
Another study confirmed that zooplankton – the microscopic organisms at the bottom of the ocean food chain – had also been contaminated with oil. Indeed, photographs issued last month of wetland coastal areas show continued contamination, with some areas still devoid of vegetation.
The study of the dolphins in Barataria Bay, off the coast of Louisiana, followed two years in which the number of dead dolphins found stranded on the coast close to the spill had dramatically increased. Although all but one of the 32 dolphins were still alive when the study ended, lead researcher Lori Schwacke said survival prospects for many were grim, adding that the hormone deficiency – while not definitively linked to the oil spill – was “consistent with oil exposure to other mammals”.
Schwacke told a Colorado based-publication last week: “This was truly an unprecedented event – there was little existing data that would indicate what effects might be seen specifically in dolphins – or other cetaceans – exposed to oil for a prolonged period of time.”
The NOAA study has been reported at the same time as two other studies suggesting that the long-term environmental effects of the Deepwater Horizon spill may have been far more profound than previously thought.
A study of deep ocean corals seven miles from the spill source jointly funded by the NOAA and BP has found dead and dying corals coated “in brown gunk”. Deepwater corals are not usually affected in oil spills, but the depth and temperatures involved in the spill appear to have been responsible for creating plumes of oil particles deep under the ocean surface, which are blamed for the unprecedented damage.
Charles Fisher, one of the scientists who jointly described the impact as unprecedented, said he believed the colony had been contaminated by a plume from the ruptured well which would have affected other organisms. “The corals are long-living and don’t move. That is why we were able to identify the damage but you would have expected it to have had an impact on other larger animals that were exposed to it.”
Chemical analysis of oil found on the dying coral showed that it came from the Deepwater Horizon spill.
The latest surveys of the damage to the marine environment come amid continued legal wrangling between the US and BP over the bill for the clean-up. BP said the US government was withholding evidence that would show the oil spill from the well in the Gulf of Mexico was smaller than claimed. Last week BP, which has set aside $37bn (£23bn) to pay for costs associated with the disaster, went to court in Louisiana to demand access to thousands of documents that it says the Obama administration is suppressing.
Read more from The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/mar/31/dolphins-sick-deepwater-oil-spill
