By Mike De Souza27 December 2013 OTTAWA (Postmedia News) – More than $100 million in cuts are underway at the federal department in charge of protecting Canada’s water and oceans, despite recommendations from top bureaucrats that it needs to increase spending for both environmental and economic reasons. According to internal federal briefing notes obtained by […]
By Elizabeth Weise 28 December 2013 (USATODAY) – Something is killing starfish up and down the West Coast and no one knows what. A mysterious illness that first appeared in June in Washington state has now spread from Sitka, Alaska, to San Diego. Starfish first waste away and then “turn into goo,” divers say. Whatever […]
By Louis Sahagun 26 December 2013 (Los Angeles Times) – Elizabeth Lopez maneuvered a massive steel claw over the side of a 134-foot sailboat and guided its descent through swaying kelp and schools of fish 10 miles off the coast of San Diego. She was hoping to catch pieces of a mysterious marine ecosystem that […]
By Ken Buesseler28 August 2013 (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution) – On 11 March 2011, a magnitude 9.0 earthquake—one of the largest ever recorded—occurred 80 miles off the coast of Japan. The earthquake created a series of tsunamis, the largest estimated to be over 30 feet, that swept ashore. In addition to the tragic human toll […]
By Bill Hoffman28 November 2013 (Sunshine Coast Daily) – Lindsay Dines has been watching dead mutton birds wash in at Teewah for more than a month. He knows death is part of their migratory fate. Their long, figure eight of the Pacific that starts in Tasmania, touches the northern hemisphere Aleutian Islands, and then California […]
By Doug Fraser25 November 2013 WOODS HOLE (Cape Cod Times) – A marine ecosystem expert is warning that the effect of changes in water temperature and plankton blooms may have ripple effects up the food chain. “We believe that the changes in the timing of warming events have affected plant and animal reproduction,” wrote oceanographer […]
By Ben Tracy12 November 2013 SANTA CRUZ, California (CBS News) – Scientists on the West Coast are at a loss to explain what’s killing sea stars, also known as starfish. In some places, 95 percent of the starfish population has died. Marine biologist Pete Raimondi showed CBS News the tide pools along California’s Monterey Bay. […]
By Greg Ray 18 October 2013 (Newcastle Herald) – It was the silence that made this voyage different from all of those before it. Not the absence of sound, exactly. The wind still whipped the sails and whistled in the rigging. The waves still sloshed against the fibreglass hull. And there were plenty of other […]
By Betsy Cohen17 October 2013 (Missoulian) – In the dark theater, on a dimly lit stage, a 32-foot-long gray whale made of plastic bags looked so lifelike, it seemed to be gliding through the depths of the ocean. As visitors came to see the one-day exhibit of “The Plastic Whale Project,” the iconic shape and […]
FUKUSHIMA (AFP-JIJI) – Radiation levels in groundwater under Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant are soaring, Tepco said Friday after taking samples from an observation well. Tepco said 400,000 becquerels per liter of beta ray-emitting substances such as strontium were detected in water sampled Thursday from the well located some 15 meters […]
