In 2012, North Sea has been suffering oil and chemical spills more than five days a week

by | Apr 11, 2012 | Mining & Drilling, Toxification

By Karrie Gillett / Press Association

Sixty-nine oil and chemical spills in the North Sea have been reported in three months. Eighteen companies were named in a table published by the Department of Energy and Climate Change. The most recent incident was a gas leak at Total’s Elgin platform on 25 March.

Professor Andrew Watterson, the head of the occupational and environmental health research group at the University of Stirling, accused companies of playing down “the potentially catastrophic consequences” of gas and oil leaks. “These are very worrying figures that cannot be slicked over by government agencies and industry,” he said. He blamed “corporate failures” for polluting the sea, and pointed out that the number of reported chemical leaks had more than doubled since 2005.

Oil & Gas UK, which represents offshore companies, said the leaks were “relatively small” and many of the chemicals “benign”. BP and Shell were among the firms listed, with BP reporting the highest number of incidents at 23. Other companies included EnQuest, British Gas and Nexen.

From The Independent: http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/north-sea-spills-on-the-rise-7627548.html

Oil exploration technique probable cause for 3,000+ dolphin deaths off coast of Peru

by | Apr 10, 2012 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Mining & Drilling

By New Zealand Herald

The death of about 3000 dolphins on a stretch of Peruvian coast in recent months is being blamed on a controversial oil exploration technique.

However other experts are not convinced, and believe a virus or pathogen may be responsible for one of the largest dolphin die-offs recorded.

So far this year, thousands of dolphins have washed up on a 135km stretch of coastline in Lambayeque, in northwestern Peru.

Numbers differ between reports, with some reporting more than 3000 of the mammals have been found dead in the past three months. Others have the figure around 2800.

Ninety percent of the dead are long-beaked common dolphins, while the remainder are Burmeister’s porpoises.

Veterinarian Carlos Yaipen, director of Lima’s Scientific Organisation for the Conservation of Aquatic Animals told Peru21 the deaths were the result of sonar testing for oil.

“The oil companies use different frequencies of acoustic waves and the effects produced by these bubbles are not plainly visible, but they generate effects later in the animals.

That can cause death by acoustic impact, not only in dolphins, but also in marine seals and whales,” Yaipen said.

All of 20 of the mammals Yaipen examined had middle ear hemorrhaging, fractures to the ear’s periotic bone, lung lesions and bubbles in the blood. Yaipen said this indicated the animals were injured but still alive when they beached.

According to a report in the Environmental Health News, oil exploration has been undertaken in the region, however it is not known whether seismic testing was underway.

Peter Ross, a research scientist at Canada’s Institute of Ocean Sciences in Sidney, British Columbia, told the Environmental Health News stress or toxic contaminants may have made the dolphins more vulnerable to pathogens. He said there may be two or three factors responsible for the deaths.

From New Zealand Herald: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=10797875

Researchers find “significant levels of radioactive iodine” in kelp off US west coast

by | Apr 10, 2012 | Toxification

By Agence France-Presse

Radioactive iodine was found in kelp off the US West Coast following last year’s earthquake-triggered Fukushima Daiichi nuclear meltdown, according to a new study.

It was already known that radioactive iodine 131 (131-I), carried in the atmosphere, made it across the Pacific within days of the March 11, 2011 tsunami disaster, albeit in minuscule amounts.

But marine biologists at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB) discovered the radioactive isotope in ocean kelp, which is “one of the strongest plant accumulators of iodine,” within a month of the accident.

“We measured significant, although most likely non-harmful levels of radioactive iodine in tissue of the giant kelp Macrocystis pyrifera,” said Steven L. Manley, author of the study with Christopher G. Lowe

“Although it is probably not harmful for humans because it was relatively low levels, it may have affected certain fish that graze on the tissue because fish have a thyroid system that utilizes iodine.”

The study, “Canopy-Forming Kelps as California’s Coastal Dosimeter: 131I from Damaged Japanese Reactor Measured in Macrocystis pyrifera,” appears in the online edition of the journal Environmental Science & Technology.

Read more from PhysOrg: http://phys.org/news/2012-04-japan-kelp-west-coast.html

Scientific records show that oceans have been heating up for more than a century

by | Apr 3, 2012 | Climate Change

By Jeremy Hance / Mongabay

In 1872 the HMS Challenger pulled out from Portsmouth, England to begin an unprecedented scientific expedition of the world’s oceans. During its over three year journey the HMS Challenger not only collected thousands of new species and sounded unknown ocean depths, but also took hundreds of temperature readings—data which is now proving invaluable to our understanding of climate change.

Utilizing the temperature data from the HMS Challenger expedition and comparing it to contemporary temperatures, researchers writing in Nature Climate Change found that the oceans’ surface— where marine warming is most intense—saw temperature rise on average by 0.59 degrees Celsius (1.1 degrees Fahrenheit) over the past 135 years or so. This implies that oceanic temperatures have been rising for at least a century.

“The significance of the study is not only that we see a temperature difference that indicates warming on a global scale, but that the magnitude of the temperature change since the 1870s is twice that observed over the past 50 years,” explains lead author Dean Roemmich, University of California San Diego physical oceanographer. “This implies that the time scale for the warming of the ocean is not just the last 50 years but at least the last 100 years.”

Prior research has shown that 90 percent of the heat added to the atmosphere has ended up in the oceans, at least since the 1960s. Roemmich told LiveScience that this implies, “the ocean temperature is probably the most direct measure we have of the energy imbalance of the whole climate system.”

While the HMS Challenger took temperatures at over 300 stations with mercury, pressure, and resistance thermometers, today some 3,500 free-floating Argo robotic probes roll through the seas gathering temperature data.

Temperatures globally, including both land and sea, have risen about 0.8 degrees Celsius (1.44 degrees Fahrenheit) since the first decade of the 1900s. The rate of warmth has doubled since 1950. Scientists overwhelmingly agree that climate change is occurring due to greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels.

From Mongabay: http://news.mongabay.com/2012/0402-hance_oceans_hmschallenger.html

Diseased dolphins, contaminated zooplankton, and dead coral: the legacies of the BP oil spill

by | 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