By Tim Wheeler October 20, 2010 The last house standing on Holland Island, an eroding sliver of land in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay, has been claimed by the water. The two-story frame structure, abandoned and badly damaged by Tropical Storm Isabel in 2003, has been teetering on the brink of collapse for some […]
Data suggest sewage upgrades working, farm runoff controls aren’t By Timothy B. Wheeler, The Baltimore Sun September 15, 2010 A new study shows some Chesapeake Bay rivers have gotten cleaner over the past three decades, while others are getting worse. The analysis, released Wednesday by the U.S. Geological Survey, suggests costly upgrades of sewage plants […]
Climate change is likely to expand and intensify “dead zones,” areas where bottom water is depleted of dissolved oxygen because of nitrogen pollution, threatening living things. More spring runoff and warmer coastal waters will increase the seasonal reduction in oxygen resulting from excess nitrogen from agriculture. Coastal dead zones in places such as the northern […]
Washington DC (SPX) Jul 06, 2010 As atmospheric carbon dioxide levels rise, so does the pressure on the plant kingdom. The hope among policymakers, scientists and concerned citizens is that plants will absorb some of the extra CO2 and mitigate the impacts of climate change. For a few decades now, researchers have hypothesized about one […]
Cambridge, Md. (June 10, 2010) – Acidity is increasing in some regions of the Chesapeake Bay even faster than is occurring in the open ocean, where it is now recognized that increased levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide dissolve in the seawater thereby making it more acidic. These more acidic conditions in key parts of Chesapeake […]
By Timothy B. Wheeler, The Baltimore Sun 9:43 a.m. EDT, May 19, 2010 While the Chesapeake Bay’s overall health improved slightly last year, the rivers that drain much of the Baltimore area remain in such poor shape that they earn a “failing grade,” University of Maryland scientists reported Tuesday. The bay as a whole improved […]
By Stephanie Ogburn, 4 Feb 2010 2:00 PM …To see nitrogen’s ill effects up close head to the mid-Atlantic coast and visit the Chesapeake Bay, the nation’s largest estuary. Once the site of a highly productive fishery and renowned for its oysters, crabs, and clams, today the bay is most famous for its ecological ruin. […]
By David A. FahrentholdWashington Post Staff WriterMonday, March 1, 2010 Nearly 40 years after the first Earth Day, this is irony: The United States has reduced the manmade pollutants that left its waterways dead, discolored and occasionally flammable. But now, it has managed to smother the same waters with the most natural stuff in the […]
The eastern seaboard’s longest continuous shark-targeted survey (UNC), conducted annually since 1972 off North Carolina, demonstrates sufficiently large declines in great sharks to imply their likely functional elimination. Declines in seven species range from 87% for sandbar sharks (Carcharhinus plumbeus); 93% for blacktip sharks (C. limbatus); up to 97% for tiger sharks (Galeocerdo cuvier); 98% […]
By Andy Sullivan REEDVILLE, Virginia (Reuters) – It doesn’t look like a disaster area. Crab boats dart back and forth on this inlet of the Chesapeake Bay as they have for generations. On the shore, million-dollar vacation homes catch the morning sun. But watermen aren’t pulling blue crabs out of the Bay this winter. After […]
