Toxic waste from U.S. pot farms alarms experts – “They are like superfund sites”

By Sharon Bernstein; editing by Ben Klayman and Richard Chang 6 August 2017 WEAVERVILLE, California (Reuters) – Pollution from illegal marijuana farms deep in California’s national forests is far worse than previously thought, and has turned thousands of acres into waste dumps so toxic that simply touching plants has landed law enforcement officers in the […]

Gulf of Mexico dead zone is the largest ever measured

2 August 2017 (NOAA) – Scientists have determined this year’s Gulf of Mexico “dead zone,” an area of low oxygen that can kill fish and marine life, is 8,776 square miles, an area about the size of New Jersey. It is the largest measured since dead zone mapping began there in 1985.The measured size is […]

Decades of data on world’s oceans reveal a troubling oxygen decline

ATLANTA, Georgia, 3 May 2017 (Georgia Tech) – A new analysis of decades of data on oceans across the globe has revealed that the amount of dissolved oxygen contained in the water – an important measure of ocean health – has been declining for more than 20 years. Researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology looked […]

Global warming making oceans more toxic by increasing algae blooms – “The distribution, frequency, and intensity of these events have increased across the globe”

STONY BROOK, N.Y., 26 April 2017 (SBU) – Climate change is predicted to cause a series of maladies for world oceans including heating up, acidification, and the loss of oxygen.  A newly published study published online in the April 24 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, titled, “Ocean warming since 1982 […]

Sub-ice phytoplankton blooms in Arctic Ocean increasing rapidly as sea ice thins – “The meter decline in sea ice thickness in the Arctic in the past 30 years has dramatically changed the ecology”

By Leah Burrows29 March 2017 (Harvard Gazette) – In 2011, researchers observed something that should be impossible — a massive bloom of phytoplankton growing under Arctic sea ice in conditions that should have been far too dark for anything requiring photosynthesis to survive. So, how was this bloom possible? Using mathematical modeling, researchers from the […]

How disappearing sea ice has put Arctic ecosystem under threat

By Robin McKie4 March 2017 (The Guardian) – In a few days the Arctic’s beleaguered sea ice cover is likely to set another grim record. Its coverage is on course to be the lowest winter maximum extent ever observed since satellite records began. These show that more than 2 million square kilometres of midwinter sea […]

Florida’s Coastal Everglades, deprived of fresh water, near unhealthy “tipping point”

By Jenny Staletovich13 February 2017 SHARK RIVER (Miami Herald) – At the bottom of the Everglades along the mouth of the Shark River, a towering mangrove forest stands in a place few people outside anglers and researchers ever see: at the edge of a vast shallow bay where the salty sea and freshwater marshes conspired […]

Lake Baikal sponge has died out completely in several areas

By Olga Gertcyk20 December 2016 (The Siberian Times) – In just two years, since the sponge was last surveyed, it has entirely vanished in the area around popular tourist resort Listvyanka and Cape Tolsty, in Irkutsk region, and over a wide area in the north of the crescent-shaped lake which contains around 20% of the […]

The blob that cooked the Pacific Ocean

By Craig Welch10 August 2016 (National Geographic) – The first fin whale appeared in Marmot Bay, where the sea curls a crooked finger around Alaska’s Kodiak Island. A biologist spied the calf drifting on its side, as if at play. Seawater flushed in and out of its open jaws. Spray washed over its slack pink […]

Tons of dead sardines wash ashore on Jeddah beach

By Amr Salam16 September 2016 JEDDAH (Saudi Gazette) – A large number of dead sardines have washed ashore the Corniche here because of sewage water thrown in the sea, according to marine experts. Several Corniche visitors expressed great concerns over the dead sardines and even captured videos and took photographs and posted them on the […]

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