Tag: inland

Gulf Oil Spill and Hurricane Season

  • Hurricane Rita in the Gulf of Mexico in 2005. (Photo courtesy of Jeff Schmaltz, NASA/GSFC )

Hurricane season starts soon. Experts predict an active season with four “major” hurricanes. What happens if a storm hits while there’s still an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico? Tanya Ott reports.

Transcript

Hurricane season starts soon. Experts predict an active season with four “major” hurricanes. What happens if a storm hits while there’s still an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico? Tanya Ott reports.

If a tropical storm hits while there’s still oil in the water, it could disastrous for the coastline and several miles inland. Mark Wysocki is a Cornell University climatologist.

“All that oil would get into the marshlands and some of the homeowners’ properties and so forth and that would make it very difficult then to remove that oil from those types of locations.”

When Katrina hit Louisiana it destroyed some of the oil distributor piping, and they’re still cleaning up in some of the wetland areas.

Wysocki says the one upside is that oil makes it harder for water to evaporate. Tropical storms need evaporation to build strength. So an oil spill might actually keep storms smaller.

For The Environment Report, I”m Tanya Ott.

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Researchers Call for Hydrilla Hunt

Great Lakes researchers are looking for volunteers to help search for an invasive aquatic plant that can choke out native vegetation, and make it tough to fish or boat. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Erin Toner reports:

Transcript

Great Lakes researchers are looking for volunteers to help search for an invasive aquatic
plant that can choke out native vegetation, and make it tough to fish or boat. The Great
Lakes Radio Consortium’s Erin Toner reports:


Universities and Sea Grant programs throughout the region want people to search bays
and inland lakes for a non-native plant called hydrilla. It’s been found in waterways in
southern states and on the East Coast. Researchers want to make sure hydrilla doesn’t
gain a foothold in the Great Lakes.


Howard Wandell is an inland lakes specialist at Michigan State University. He says
hydrilla forms a net of vines at the surface of the water.


“It’s difficult to motorboat through and obviously trying to cast fishing lures through it is
very difficult if not impossible. And of course then just the idea of even trying to swim
in it, people are very repulsed by the idea of trying to go out and try to recreate in this
tangled mass of vegetation.”


Wandell says hydrilla also blocks sunlight, which can kill native water plants.


For the GLRC, I’m Erin Toner.

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