Oceans

Bad Idea: Using Tires To Create An Artificial Reef

December 27, 2015 Laura Goldman, www.care2.com Educate! Environment, Oceans

By Laura Goldman for Care2. Perceived as a win-win way to get rid of the tires filling Florida landfills by putting them to use as an artificial reef off the coast of Fort Lauderdale, about two million tires were bound with metal clips and dumped in the Atlantic Ocean back in 1972. The tire reef project was organized by Ray McAllister, an ocean engineering professor at Florida Atlantic University, and was approved by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. It’s no surprise that a big supporter of the project was the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company. Decades later, the project has turned out to be a terrible idea. It seems like anyone with a basic knowledge of science would have understood the effect of water on metal and how, after time, the metal clips might rust away — which is just what they did. The two million tires they once held in place were spread apart by ocean currents, likely destroying any marine life that had managed to grow on them.

17 Of The Worst Corporate Crimes In 2015

December 27, 2015 Phil Mattera, www.DirtDiggersDigest.org Educate! Big Banks, Big Pharma, Bribery, Climate Change, Corporate crime, Finance, Food and Agriculture, Oceans, Oil and Gas, pollution, Wage Theft, Workplace hazards

By Phil Mattera for Dirt Diggers Digest. The ongoing corporate crime wave showed no signs of abating in 2015. BP paid a record $20 billion to settle the remaining civil charges relating to the Deepwater Horizon disaster (on top of the $4 billion in previous criminal penalties), and Volkswagen is facing perhaps even greater liability in connection with its scheme to evade emission standards. Other automakers and suppliers were hit with large penalties for safety violations, including a $900 million fine (and deferred criminal prosecution) for General Motors, a record civil penalty of $200 million for Japanese airbag maker Takata, penalties of $105 million and $70 million for Fiat Chrysler, and $70 million for Honda. Major banks continued to pay large penalties to resolve a variety of legal entanglements. Five banks (Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Barclays, Royal Bank of Scotland and UBS) had to pay a total of $2.5 billion to the Justice Department and $1.8 billion to the Federal Reserve in connection with charges that they conspired to manipulate foreign exchange markets.

Stop Fracking Our Oceans, Californians Say

August 16, 2014 Miyoko Sakashita, www.huffingtonpost.com Resist! California, Fracking, Oceans, pollution

Contaminated water, polluted air, increased earthquake risk: As fracking has expanded across America, this dangerous form of oil and gas production has caused massive harm to our environment and public health. Now the oil industry is ramping up fracking offshore, in our delicate coastal ecosystems. The Gulf of Mexico, industry sources say, is about to experience a steep increase in offshore fracking, which involves blasting water and industrial chemicals into the sea-floor at high pressures to crack the rock and release oil and gas. Here in California, the oil industry has already fracked hundreds of offshore wells near Seal Beach and Long Beach and in the Santa Barbara Channel. There's been almost no oversight of this dangerous practice by federal and state officials, who can't even say exactly where or how often fracking has been used off our coast. But Californians are fighting back, determined to protect the Golden State's coastal communities, beautiful beaches and endangered marine wildlife. A majority of state voters back a ban on offshore fracking, according to a new poll commissioned by my organization and conducted by Public Policy Polling. The poll also found 2 in 3 California voters are concerned about offshore fracking's effects on endangered marine wildlife like blue whales, who congregate in the Santa Barbara Channel.

White House OKs Underwater Torture Chamber

July 26, 2014 Sardonicky, www.kmgarcia2000.blogspot.com Educate! Climate Change, Oceans, Oil, Torture

With all eyes glued on the atrocities in Gaza and Ukraine, another homegrown atrocity may soon be underway. The Obama administration has quietly executed one of those sneaky summer weekend news dumps in hopes of nobody noticing or caring. Because what, after all, are pods of insane dolphins, and hordes of dead turtles, and the extinction of an entire whale species compared to hundreds of battered human bodies? From Think Progress: On Friday, the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) approved the use of seismic airguns to explore the seabed from Cape May to Cape Canaveral for oil and gas. These sonic cannons are compressed airguns that get towed behind ships, using dynamite-like blasts to produce sound waves 100,000 times louder than a jet engine underwater every ten seconds. The waves travel through the water and through the ocean floor, bouncing back up at different rates to provide prospective drillers and researchers a better sense of where oil, gas, minerals, and sand lie beneath the waves.

World’s Oceans Face ‘Irreparable Damage’

July 9, 2014 The Real News, www.therealnews.com Educate! Environment, Fish, Oceans, pollution

There are a number of things happening to the ocean, and one of them is the fish in the ocean. And there has been and continues to be quite a lot of overfishing. And more and more we see that the catch we are getting from the ocean is stabilizing more even declining overall globally. But for some specific fisheries, there have been collapses in it, and the classical one is the cod stocks off Newfoundland in Eastern Canada. So there are some collapses and overall resistible stabilizing of global catches because there's no more place to go fishing in. We started fishing by the coasts, rather close to the coasts. And as those were depleted, we kept moving further into the ocean and deeper. And now there's no place to go. What this means is that the fishing effort, that is, the amount of people and machines we take out to catch fish, is increasing whiles we are getting less and less back in terms of returns. So that is on the fish side. And then, when you move into the marine pollution, there's a lot of debris, plastic being absorbed or taken in by the ocean. And this has huge consequences, right? Some of these things stay in the water forever almost, and they split and become very little pieces of plastic that the fish see and think is food, is algae, and then they eat them, and there are consequences all over.

Sick Seabirds Warn Of Plastic Pollution In The Oceans

June 8, 2014 Elizabeth Claire Alberts, www.earthisland.org Educate! Birds, Oceans, Plastic, pollution

It’s a late May night on Lord Howe Island, and the moon gleams across the volcanic mountains and white sand beaches of this six-mile long isle off the east coast of Australia. While most people are tucked inside their houses or hotels, conservation biologist Dr. Jennifer Lavers and her colleague, naturalist Ian Hutton, don headlamps and bike to the flesh-footed shearwater colony on the northeast side of the island. Lord Howe Island is one of the two main breeding areas for this seabird in the southwest Pacific Ocean (the other is in northern New Zealand). Tonight the colony bustles with 90-day-old chicks flapping their wings as they prepare for their first 6,500-mile flight north to the Bering Sea. Even though many seabirds are affected by plastic pollution, the plight flesh-footed shearwater illustrates how widespread the problem is. Lavers and Hutton set up a makeshift research station in the colony, and handpick chicks to weigh, measure, and take feather samples. They also undertake a lavage process, guiding a tube down each bird’s throat to flush out its stomach contents. This part may seem gruesome, but the lavage provides important information about shearwater diet and nutrition. If a fledgling’s parents fed it well, it will regurgitate natural food sources like squid and fish. But more often than not, chicks will cough up something that does not belong in their stomachs – plastic.

World Oceans Day: The Ins And Outs Of Oceans

June 5, 2014 David Suzuki, www.rabble.ca Educate! Climate Change, Oceans, pollution

June 8 is World Oceans Day. It’s a fitting time to contemplate humanity's evolving relationship with the source of all life. For much of human history, we've affected marine ecosystems primarily by what we've taken out of the seas. The challenge as we encounter warming temperatures and increasing industrial activity will be to manage what we put into them. As a top predator, humans from the tropics to the poles have harvested all forms of marine life, from the smallest shrimp to the largest whales, from the ocean's surface to its floor. The staggering volume of fish removed from our waters has had a ripple effect through all ocean ecosystems. Yet the ocean continues to provide food for billions of people, and improved fishing practices in many places, including Canada, are leading to healthier marine-life populations. We're slowly getting better at managing what we catch to keep it within the ocean’s capacity to replenish. But while we may be advancing in this battle, we're losing the war with climate change and pollution.

«1 2 3 »

Daily movement news and resources