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.
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.
Melting Arctic permafrost could put even more methane – a potent greenhouse gas – into the atmosphere than previously thought, with worrying implications for the pace of global warming.
Many ice sheets that sit like caps over rock crevices trap natural seeps of methane; when they melt, the gas can quickly be released into the atmosphere in “burps”. Geologists have long suspected that iced-over geological structures might entrap vast stores of ancient methane that seep from coal and gas deposits, although no one knows exactly how much is there.
These stores, along with deep-water stores and shallow (more recent) deposits of decaying plant material in frozen soil, might open as the Arctic warms, releasing vast amounts of methane. Then, as the climate warms, more methane seeps could open and warming could accelerate.
During the winter, when Alaska was covered with ice, Katey Walter Anthony of the University of Alaska in Fairbanks and her colleagues flew planes over 6700 lakes in the state, looking for holes in the ice that might indicate lakes with methane seeps. They analysed gas from 50 holes and carbon-dated the methane leaking from them to determine the age of the gas. They did a similar survey of 25 lakes in Greenland.
Ancient gas
At boundaries where permafrost cover is melting or glaciers are retreating, the researchers found old methane, indicating that it came from deep in the Earth and is only now being released. The team then created a model that extrapolated where these natural pockets would be located in lakes throughout Alaska. They found the likeliest locations at the edges of ice sheets.
The team estimate that Alaska is emitting 50 to 70 per cent more methane into the atmosphere than previously thought. Geological records indicate that the model would also apply to deep methane stores in Canada and Siberia, currently covered by ice.
Walter Anthony says that the presence of oil and gas in the Antarctic indicates it may hold ancient methane as well. “This is a far more nuanced study than has been done,” says Carolyn Ruppel of the US Geological Survey in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Although she praises Walter Anthony’s modeling work, she points out that extrapolating the findings to draw conclusions about methane seeps on other continents is very difficult.
Any release of it could accelerate warming at the poles and speed the entire process, Walter Anthony says, but it’s hard to predict exactly how soon this could happen. To answer this, her group plans to look at how methane is captured and stored in permafrost, and the pattern in which it melts.
Humanity’s unquenchable thirst for fresh water is driving up sea levels even faster than melting glaciers, according to new research. The massive impact of the global population’s growing need for water on rising sea levels is revealed in a comprehensive assessment of all the ways in which people use water.
Trillions of tonnes of water have been pumped up from deep underground reservoirs in every part of the world and then channelled into fields and pipes to keep communities fed and watered. The water then flows into the oceans, but far more quickly than the ancient aquifers are replenished by rains. The global tide would be rising even more quickly but for the fact that manmade reservoirs have, until now, held back the flow by storing huge amounts of water on land.
“The water being taken from deep wells is geologically old – there is no replenishment and so it is a one way transfer into the ocean,” said sea level expert Prof Robert Nicholls, at the University of Southampton. “In the long run, I would still be more concerned about the impact of climate change, but this work shows that even if we stabilise the climate, we might still get sea level rise due to how we use water.” He said the sea level would rise 10 metres or more if all the world’s groundwater was pumped out, though he said removing every drop was unlikely because some aquifers contain salt water. The sea level is predicted to rise by 30-100cm by 2100, putting many coasts at risk, by increasing the number of storm surges that swamp cities.
The new research was led by Yadu Pokhrel, at the University of Tokyo, and published in Nature Geoscience. “Our study is based on a state-of-the-art model which we have extensively validated in our previous works,” he said. “It suggests groundwater is a major contributor to the observed sea level rise.” The team’s results also neatly fill a gap scientists had identified between the rise in sea level observed by tide gauges and the contribution calculated to come from melting ice.
The drawing of water from deep wells has caused the sea to rise by an average of a millimetre every year since 1961, the researchers concluded. The storing of freshwater in reservoirs has offset about 40% of that, but the scientists warn that this effect is diminishing.
“Reservoir water storage has levelled off in recent years,” they write. “By contrast, the contribution of groundwater depletion has been increasing and may continue to do so in the future, which will heighten the concerns regarding the potential sea level rise in the 21st century.” Nicholls, who was not part of the research team, said there are a wide range of projections of future sea level. “But this work makes one worry about the uncertainty at the high end more,” he said.
The researchers compared the contribution of groundwater withdrawal and reservoir storage to the more familiar causes of rising sea level: ice melted by global warming and the expansion of the ocean as it warms. The pumping out of groundwater is five times bigger in scale than the melting of the planet’s two great ice caps, in Greenland and Antarctica, and twice as great as both the melting of all other glaciers and ice or the thermal expansion of seawater.
The scale of groundwater use is as vast as it is unsustainable: over the past half century 18 trillion tonnes of water has been removed from underground aquifers without being replaced. In some parts of the world, the stores of water have now been exhausted. Saudi Arabia, for example, was self-sufficient in wheat, grown in the desert using water from deep, fossil aquifers. Now, many of the aquifers have run dry and most wheat is imported, with all growing expected to end in 2016. In northern India, the level of the water table is dropping by 4cm every year.
Tiny pieces of plastic contaminate almost every sea in the world. Now scientists have found that marine creatures like fish and birds are eating this microscopic waste, which may be harming their health.
The main concern is that microplastics are plastic pieces too small to see with the naked eye. They may be small by design, or be fragments of larger pieces of plastic waste.
Their size means they can be mistaken for food by even the smallest sea creatures, as well as large animals like seabirds and fish.
Scientists are concerned about the damage this could be causing. Plastics could block animals’ digestive systems or lower the amount of food they can eat. Not only that, but microplastics can carry toxic chemicals on their surface. So, scientists are calling for further research into pollution from microscopic waste.
“Things have progressed in terms of understanding where you can find microplastics and how much is out there, but we still haven’t worked out what damage this is doing to animals,” says Matthew Cole from the Plymouth Marine Laboratory and the University of Exeter, who has co-authored a major review of all published microplastic studies.
“We’re still on the tip of the iceberg in terms of understanding how these particles affect the health of marine animals,” he adds.
Mass production of plastic began in the 1940s and has since exploded. In 2009, 230 million tonnes of plastic were produced, equivalent to the weight of a double-decker bus every two seconds. The increase in large plastic waste in the sea quickly concerned people, because of its visibility. Understandably, the spread of microscopic plastic fragments has gone largely unnoticed by the general public.
But the chemicals these fragments carry may be more dangerous than the plastics themselves. Plastic often contains additives to make it last longer. These additives can be harmful to health, changing hormonal patterns in fish and birds. And, because plastics are oil-based, they are particularly good at attracting waterborne pollutants from other sources.
These persistent organic pollutants can lead to hormone disruption, development problems and cancer. If marine animals swallow tiny plastic particles, the chemicals on their surface could be easily taken up.
“Almost like a Trojan horse, microplastics can help transfer potentially dangerous chemicals to animals,” Cole explains.
The scientists also looked at where these microplastics come from. Some are designed to be microscopic. These include the beads used in exfoliating facial washes, as well as those used in air-blasters to remove rust and paint from the hulls of boats. Other microplastics may be fragments of bigger objects, from plastic bags to fishing gear.
Half the world’s population lives within just 50 miles of the coast, so it’s easy to see how plastic waste gets into the marine environment. It finds its way into storm drains and sewage systems, where it slips through the filters in wastewater treatment works into rivers and out to sea. Around 80 percent of plastic debris in the sea comes from inland.
Now, Cole is trying to work out whether the tiniest sea creatures, called zooplankton, can take up microplastics. This is the first stage in trying to understand whether these particles can travel up the food chain. If they can get into zooplankton, then they could be passed on to bigger animals that eat them. This so-called trophic transfer could ultimately affect us too.
“If they’re trophically transferred they could end up in the human food supply,” says Cole. “But, without doing a lot more work we won’t know what the full effects of these compounds are.”
