Critics of sonar say it’s so loud that it confuses whales and other marine animals, and can cause them to be injured or even die.
(Photo courtesy of NOAA)
A new federal ruling could
protect marine animals by
changing how and where
the Navy uses sonar. Samara Freemark reports:
Transcript
A new federal ruling could
protect marine animals by
changing how and where
the Navy uses sonar. Samara Freemark reports:
Critics of sonar say it’s so loud that it confuses whales and other marine animals, and can cause them to be injured or even die. That’s why environmental groups have been pushing for tighter regulations on the technology.
This week the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, took a step in that direction. The agency acknowledged that current policies are not doing enough to protect marine mammals. And NOAA says it will identify critical marine habitats impacted by sonar.
Michael Jasny is a policy analyst with the environmental group the Natural Resources Defense Council. He hopes the policy will be a first step to banning sonar in those habitats.
“It’s not a prescription, it’s a plan. And it sets in motion potentially a very significant change. I mean, the proof will be in the pudding, of course.”
Jasny says his organization will work with NOAA and the Navy to negotiate sonar policy so that marine mammals are not hurt.
Researchers with Project Kaisei are studying a swirling
vortex of trash that has
accumulated out in the Pacific Ocean. (Photo by Annie Crawley, courtesy of Project Kaisei)
A huge current rotates in the Pacific Ocean, causing floating plastic trash to gather in a giant vortex of garbage in the middle of the ocean – it’s become the world’s biggest dump. Project Kaisei has sent two ships to the area to study the problem. Doug Woodring is on the New Horizon. He talked with Lester Graham by satellite phone:
Transcript
A huge current rotates in the Pacific Ocean, causing floating plastic trash to gather in a giant vortex of garbage in the middle of the ocean – it’s become the world’s biggest dump. Project Kaisei has sent two ships to the area to study the problem. Doug Woodring is on the New Horizon. He talked with Lester Graham by satellite phone:
Lester Graham: You’re in the middle of the Pacific right now, looking for the Great Pacific Garbage patch. How much luck have you had in locating some of this plastic debris?
Doug Woodring: Unfortunately, too much luck. (laughs) It hasn’t been very difficult. In fact, I’m running into, ah, I can look out the window and see a big floating piece, right now, as we’re going by. But we’ve been, the last 5-6 days, we’ve been in it consistently. It’s not as many big pieces as the world might think, but it’s way many more small pieces than people know. And the reason is, with the UV dedrigation in the plastics, it get very brittle when it’s broken down by the sun, so after some time in the water, when the wave action, it’s very easy for everything to break down and sort of crack. So what we’re getting is what they call ‘confetti’, and it’s just literally in some places many, many pieces per square meter of this stuff. And we are really looking mostly at the surface, so it’s not known yet how deep this is either. So, there’s a lot of stuff out here.
Graham: Why’s this bad for the environment?
Woodring: When you get small pieces, you’ve got mistaken potential food source for animals. So, the marine life can be eating this. It is possible that it gets in the food chain. There are toxins, heavy metals, and persistent organic pollutants that attach themselves to plastics when they float. So, it’s not just a piece of plastic that a marine life eats, it’s a polluted piece of plastic. It’s also a little island, or a little flotation for species that can float around the ocean – and invasive species can go to different parts of the waters or land that wouldn’t have traveled that way otherwise. So, there’s a lot of implications that this science is only just now starting to help us figure out what’s going on.
Graham: Does anybody have any idea what we can do to reduce the impact of this huge garbage patch or to clean it up?
Woodring: Well, this is what we’re out here for. That’s the main part of our mission is to find solutions. And we can’t find solutions until we have some of the answers, and some of the data. So what we’re out here is with two vessels now, over a 30 day period, really looking for that data – water depth, leadings and temperatures and flows and salinity – to see how the plastics and the material, the debris might move around in the ocean. We will, later, be doing some analysis on the material, science of the plastics, to see if it’s recognizable by satellite. Because, obviously, without satellite imagery, it’s impossible to know exactly where the bigger masses are. You know, ‘how to clean it up,’ is going to be a very tricky thing, because the oceans are so big and these particles are not big. It’s all going to come back to what we’re doing on land, really, and the land policies for different ways to bring in better recycling and rebate programs to get a lot of the plastic that is out there today to be reused instead of simply thrown away, and so it doesn’t get into the rivers or the oceans in the first place.
Doug Woodring is a co-founder of Project Kaisei. He spoke with The Environment Report’s Lester Graham.
The boardwalk in Ocean City, Maryland. Before beach replenishment, you could get your feet wet standing underneath the boardwalk. Now, as you can see, the water is 200 feet away. (Photo by Tamara Keith)
A dune piled high with sand helps protect Ocean City from the sea. (Photo by Tamara Keith)
A wide stretch of beach separates homes and hotels in Ocean City from the water. (Photo by Tamara Keith)
Condos in Ocean City once had water washing into their ground level parking lots. Not anymore. (Photo by Tamara Keith)
It’s beach weather – and along the mid-Atlantic one of the most popular beaches is Ocean
City, Maryland. For years, engineers have been battling back the ocean to save the beach
and the town. And as Tamara Keith reports, that fight is only going to get tougher and
more expensive if predictions of sea level rise from climate change become a reality:
Transcript
It’s beach weather – and along the mid-Atlantic one of the most popular beaches is Ocean
City, Maryland. For years, engineers have been battling back the ocean to save the beach
and the town. And as Tamara Keith reports, that fight is only going to get tougher and
more expensive if predictions of sea level rise from climate change become a reality:
When the sea level rises, Ocean City feels it. It’s on the front lines – a barrier island on
the edge of the Atlantic.
(sounds of water)
Terry McGean is the city engineer for a town he describes as a working class resort.
“Our industry is tourism, and the real reason people come here is the beach.”
But in the 1980s, that beach was reduced to a narrow strip. Not so today, all thanks to a
massive, and expensive, beach replenishment project. In 1991 countless tons of sand
were brought in, dunes were built. But that wasn’t the end of it.
To keep up with erosion, McGean says the beach here at Ocean City has already been re-
nourished 4 times.
“Approximately every 4 years we’re doing a re-nourishment project. To give you an idea
of the scale, that’s 100,000 truck loads of material that we’ll put on here. Though it
doesn’t actually come on a truck? No. It’s pumped in a dredge from out in the ocean.”
It is a constant fight, because the waves keep coming, keep pulling the sand back out to
sea. Scientists say this is partially just normal erosion. But some of it at least can be
blamed on global climate change and sea level rise. Over time, they say, the share of the
problem caused by climate change will grow.
“If you hadn’t done the beach replenishment do you have any sense of what this would
look like right now. There probably would have been no public beach left in many of
these areas.”
So far fending off the sea has cost $90-million, split amongst local, state and federal tax
dollars. But engineers estimate some $240-million in storm damage has been prevented.
“Holding back the sea is an economic proposition. If you’re willing to spend the money,
the sand exists to elevate any given barrier island.”
Jim Titus is the project manager for sea level rise at the Environmental Protection
Agency. And he’s been sounding the alarm about climate change for years. And he says
policy makers and the public will eventually have to decide which beaches, which
communities are worth saving.
“The challenge for communities like Ocean City is to persuade everyone else that they
are one of those cities that are too important to give up. And then to get their residents to
cooperate in doing what it takes to do to gradually elevate the entire community with a
rising sea.”
But if you think in geologic time, like University of Maryland professor Michael Kearney
does, there isn’t a whole lot of hope for barrier islands like Ocean City.
“It’s essentially a pile of sand. There’s really nothing permanent about it.”
Kearney studies coastal processes.
“The long term prospect of any barrier surviving the projected rates of sea level rise, even
at the moderate rates – the so-called moderate rates, that the IPCC predicted is pretty
slim.”
Ocean City engineer Terry McGean just isn’t buying it. He thinks Ocean City can survive
sea level rise.
“I think that we can design towards it and we can probably build towards it and with
responsible actions we can live with it.”
As long as there’s enough sand and money to keep it going.
Michael Bernitsas, professor in the Department of Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering, stands before a prototype of his VIVACE hydrokinetic energy device. (Photo by Scott Galvin, courtesy of the University of Michigan)
Some scientists think that
the future of energy is in water.
More specifically, it’s in slow-
moving water. Kyle Norris has more:
Transcript
Some scientists think that
the future of energy is in water.
More specifically, it’s in slow-
moving water. Kyle Norris has more:
Michael Bernitsas is really excited about using water to generate electricity.
“Marine renewable energy is huge. Water is the best natural medium for
storing energy.”
Bernitsas is a Professor of Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering at the
University of Michigan. And he’s made this machine. Basically it’s a
cylinder that bobs up-and-down in a tank of slow flowing water. The
cylinder creates these swirls of water that hit a generator. And it turns the
kinetic energy into electricity.
Bernitsas thinks there’s a lot of potential to create clean, renewable energy
from flowing water. He says people could eventually put machines, like this
one, in rivers and power houses.
And he says bigger versions of the machine could go into oceans and rivers.
And generate as much electricity as a small coal-burning power plant.
becoming more intense. Lester Graham reports the authors
speculate it might be because of climate change:
Transcript
A new study finds the worst hurricanes are becoming more intense. Lester Graham reports the authors speculate it might be because of climate change:
James Elsner is a climatologist at Florida State University. He and his team have been studying wind speeds in hurricanes…
“Well, we found the strongest tropical cyclones, globally, are increasing in intensity.”
Elsner says this is exactly what computer models suggested should happen as the oceans warmed due to climate change. The theory goes that warmer water gives the storms more energy…
“There’s a clean connection with the theory that I think allows us some speculation that as the seas continue to warm, the strongest storms should get stronger.”
And that could mean more damage to coastal areas, put more people at risk, and cause more damage and oil spills at offshore drilling platforms.
Hardened shorelines protect buildings, roads, and homes, but many developers say a more natural method should be used. (Photo by Lester Graham)
Along many Great Lakes cities, long concrete or stone seawalls protect property against
wind and wave erosion. It’s a hardening of the shoreline that some people say is
necessary to protect expensive real estate. But some scientists and environmentalists say
it’s part of one of the ‘Ten Threats to the Great Lakes. They’re worried those concrete
seawalls are not only hurting the environment… in the long run, they’re hurting the
economy. Lynette Kalsnes has this report:
Transcript
In our series ‘Ten Threats to the Great Lakes,’ we’ve been looking at how humans make
changes that affect the health of the lakes. Lester Graham is our guide through the series.
He says the next report shows how far we’ll go to try to manage nature:
Along many Great Lakes cities, long concrete or stone seawalls protect property against
wind and wave erosion. It’s a hardening of the shoreline that some people say is
necessary to protect expensive real estate. But some scientists and environmentalists say
it’s part of one of the ‘Ten Threats to the Great Lakes. They’re worried those concrete
seawalls are not only hurting the environment… in the long run, they’re hurting the
economy. Lynette Kalsnes has this report:
(waves lapping against concrete wall)
In the middle of a miles-long concrete shoreline, there’s a tiny beach. Steve Forman points
toward a small bluff at the base of a tree. The professor of earth and environmental sciences at
the University of Illinois at Chicago says the sand, grass and dunes help soften the impact of
waves and rain.
“This kind of relief is what you’d see in many natural coastlines, a coastline like this can
accommodate change better than one that’s been concreted up.”
Just feet away, the concrete picks back up, like a stark white runway that bisects the land and the
lake. Concrete revetments like these in Chicago are a familiar sight in urban areas across the
Great Lakes.
Roy Deda is with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The Corps manages much of the
construction on public shorelines. Deda says hardening the shore is one way of protecting against
erosion.
“Where hardening of the shoreline is important and used, is where you have an existing
community in an urban area like Chicago. You have a lot of development in place already, and
basically you’re protecting what’s been built over a long history.”
Deda says it protects property. But scientist Steve Forman says using concrete walls comes at a
cost: the destruction of natural systems that are often helpful.
Forman says wetlands and stream valleys normally act like a sponge to absorb high lake levels.
They also release some of the water back when lake levels are low. Forman says concrete can’t
buffer those fluctuations.
“It makes the extremes potentially even more extreme in terms of lake level variations.”
So, when there’s a rainstorm, Forman says the water runs off the concrete quickly… instead of
being absorbed across sand or wetlands slowly.
He says the same thing is true for the water flowing into the lakes from rivers.
Discharge into rivers can go up by 50 times the amount it would if natural areas buffered the
rivers.
“Any time we change the landscape from its natural components, we also change the plumbing of
the Great Lakes. We change the way water is routed in and around and through the Great Lakes
as well.”
It’s not only rushing rivers and lake levels that cause problems.
When the shoreline is hardened… the wildlife and organisms that once lived there disappear.
Cameron Davis is with the Alliance for the Great Lakes. He says many rare species live in that
narrow ribbon where the land meets the water.
“When we harden the shorelines, we basically sterilize them in a lot of ways, because we’ve not
providing the kinds of habitat and cover that we need for many of them.”
And beyond the effect on wildlife… hardening the shoreline can also be a bad economic decision.
Steve Forman says permanent structures built near the shores are not as stable as they might seem
when lake levels are high and winter storms cause big waves that erode the land underneath them.
“When the lake levels go up, the erosion rates are just phenomenal…what you see are hanging
stairs everywhere, instead of stairs that take you down to the beach, they’re hanging over the lake,
basically.”
That’s why scientists and planners are taking action. The Alliance for the Great Lakes’ Cameron
Davis is calling on planners to balance protecting the shoreline … with preserving ecology.
“Frankly I don’t think shoreline planning across the region is that great. There really is no single
unifying policy we’re all using to guide what our shorelines ought to look like.”
He’s hoping that some cities will experiment with restoring natural areas along their shorelines…
He says we need to see if in the long run, nature can do a better job of protecting the shores.
Critics of sonar say it’s so loud that it confuses whales and other marine animals, and can cause them to be injured or even die. (Photo courtesy of NOAA)
