Showing posts with label Ecology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ecology. Show all posts

Sunday, February 17, 2008

If it's not the crabs, it's the lawyers

I mean sharks:

Boston, MA (AHN) - If the present trend of global warming continues, the marine life in Antarctica will be at risk from an invasion of sharks, crabs and other predators, biologists have warned. Expressing their concerns at the annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the biologists warned that the presence of sharks in the Antarctica could prove devastating to its underwater ecosystem.

Since the temperature of Antarctica's surrounding waters remain at the freezing point, they become too cold for sharks and other fish living in the vast continent's seas. This makes the Antarctic seafloor occupied mainly by relatively soft-bodied, slow-moving invertebrates.

[snip]
If this happens, the presence of sharks would completely change the ecology of the Antarctic underwater community. In the last 50 years, sea surface temperatures around Antarctica have risen by 1 to 2C, which is more than twice the global average. This has lead to the presence of crabs in the waters for the first time in ages. This will disrupt the composition of the archaic marine communities scientists said.

Professor Cheryl Wilga of the University of Rhode Island (URI), U.S. said, "Sharks are going to arrive in Antarctica as long as the warming trend continues, a bit more slowly than crabs - crabs are going to get there first,"

"But once they do get there they are capable of eating the organisms that live there."
Nice. Not only do we wreck up the planet and melt the polar ice caps, we get to watch all the species disappear, one by one by one.

Update 2/18:

Starting with polar bears (and denied by the US Senate: U.S. Senate Report Debunks Polar Bear Extinction Fears )

And now penguins.

Update 2/20: Hipparchia in comments noted the site United States Senate Environment and Public Works Committee is connected to Senator Inhofe, a rabid global warming denier.

Sunday, January 20, 2008

Did it really take three years to ask this question?

How Much Responsibility Does Oil-Gas Industry Have in Gulf Coast's Katrina Disaster?

[snip]

The delta, formed by the accumulation of the Mississippi River's upstream mud over thousands of years, is a shadow of what it was 100 years ago. Since the 1930s, a fifth of the 10,000-square-mile delta has turned into open water, decreasing the delta's economic and ecologic value by as much as $15 billion a year, according to Louisiana State University studies.

The rate of land loss, among the highest in the world, has exposed New Orleans and hundreds of other communities to the danger of drowning. Katrina made that painfully clear.

[snip]

In Katrina's wake, the Army Corps of Engineers has gotten the brunt of the criticism for the disaster. Besides building suspect levees, the Corps' mission to control waterways with spillways, floodgates and other measures has played havoc with nature by restricting the Mississippi's sediment and fresh upriver water from replenishing the delta's wetlands.

There are other reasons for the disastrous wetlands loss: Human development, cypress logging, ill-advised farming on the coast, hurricanes, slipping-and-sliding geologic faults and even a South American semi-aquatic rodent called nutria imported to Louisiana in the 1930s.

But many scientists say the oil industry's 10,000 miles of canals - enough to stretch nearly halfway around the world - and the drilling they supported played a decisive role. Some scientists say drilling caused half of the land loss, or about 1,000 square miles.

"The whole thing was manifest destiny written large on a marshy landscape," said John Day, an LSU professor emeritus who specializes in delta ecologies.

The industry denies that and points to disagreement among scientists over who or what caused damage, and how much.

No one will ever accept responsibility. There are enough fingers to point, enough officials to quote, enough companies to blame. And nothing will be done because it costs money.