Underwater oil plumes could create new 'dead zone' in Gulf

Oceans' fish could disappear in 40 years: UN
New York (AFP) May 17, 2010 - The world faces the nightmare possibility of fishless oceans by 2050 unless fishing fleets are slashed and stocks allowed to recover, UN experts warned Monday. "If the various estimates we have received... come true, then we are in the situation where 40 years down the line we, effectively, are out of fish," Pavan Sukhdev, head of the UN Environment Program's green economy initiative, told journalists in New York. A Green Economy report due later this year by UNEP and outside experts argues this disaster can be avoided if subsidies to fishing fleets are slashed and fish are given protected zones -- ultimately resulting in a thriving industry. The report, which was opened to preview Monday, also assesses how surging global demand in other key areas including energy and fresh water can be met while preventing ecological destruction around the planet.

UNEP director Achim Steiner said the world was "drawing down to the very capital" on which it relies. However, "our institutions, our governments are perfectly capable of changing course, as we have seen with the extraordinary uptake of interest. Around, I think it is almost 30 countries now have engaged with us directly, and there are many others revising the policies on the green economy," he said. Environmental experts are mindful of the failure this March to push through a worldwide ban on trade in bluefin tuna, one of the many species said to be headed for extinction. Powerful lobbying from Japan and other tuna-consuming countries defeated the proposal at the CITES conference on endangered species in Doha. But UNEP's warning Monday was that tuna only symbolizes a much vaster catastrophe, threatening economic, as well as environmental upheaval.

One billion people, mostly from poorer countries, rely on fish as their main animal protein source, according to the UN. The Green Economy report estimates there are 35 million people fishing around the world on 20 million boats. About 170 million jobs depend directly or indirectly on the sector, bringing the total web of people financially linked to 520 million. According to the UN, 30 percent of fish stocks have already collapsed, meaning they yield less than 10 percent of their former potential, while virtually all fisheries risk running out of commercially viable catches by 2050. Currently only a quarter of fish stocks -- mostly the cheaper, less desirable species -- are considered to be in healthy numbers.

The main scourge, the UNEP report says, are government subsidies encouraging ever bigger fishing fleets chasing ever fewer fish, with little attempt made to allow the fish populations to recover. The annual 27 billion dollars in government subsidies to fishing, mostly in rich countries, is "perverse," Sukhdev said, since the entire value of fish caught is only 85 billion dollars. As a result, fishing fleet capacity is "50 to 60 percent" higher than it should be, Sukhdev said. Creating marine preservation areas to allow female fish to grow to full size, thereby hugely increasing their fertility, is one vital solution, the report says. Another is restructuring the fishing fleets to favor smaller boats that -- once fish stocks recover -- would be able to land bigger catches. "What is scarce here is fish," Sukhdev said, "not the stock of fishing capacity."

by Staff Writers
New Orleans, Louisiana (AFP) May 17, 2010
Giant plumes of oil floating deep in the Gulf of Mexico could create a new 'dead zone' of oxygen-depleted waters unfit for marine life and wreak environmental damage that will take generations to overcome, scientists warned Monday.

"Normally, in a shallow spill, everything pretty much shoots up to the surface and the impacts are primarily to surface organisms like turtles, dolphins, and birds," said Paul Montagna, a marine ecologist at the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies.

But the oil which has been gushing out of the wreckage of the BP-leased Deepwater Horizon since April 22 is traveling up through chilly, dark waters 5,000 feet below the surface.

"Under this really cold, high pressure environment the oil is getting dispersed through the water column," Montagna said in a telephone interview.

"What that means is that basically life in the entire water column is now being exposed."

Adding to the toxic soup are more than 580,000 gallons of chemical dispersants applied to the surface of the slick and also directly into the subsea stream of crude gushing out of a ruptured pipe.

Those dispersants are being used to help keep the oil away from sensitive shorelines by breaking it up into smaller clumps, some of which will be consumed by microbes and some of which will eventually sink to the ocean floor.

The problem is that those microbes end up consuming oxygen in the process and there is an enormous amount of oil that needs to be consumed, said Chris D'Elia, dean of the School of Coast & Environment at Louisiana State University.

"The toxicity alone or the bod (the biological oxygen demand) problem alone are substantial issues," D'Elia told AFP.

"When you start adding the two together, God only knows what's going on."

The Gulf already suffers from a massive 'dead zone' which forms every spring when agricultural runoff carried out to sea by the Mississippi River causes algae to bloom and suck up the oxygen in shallower waters.

Mobile marine life like fish, shrimp and dolphins usually migrate east of the dead zone, which happens to be the area most directly affected by the oil slick.

"Clearly you'd expect a huge die off in the water column as well as in the (affected) sediments," said Wilma Subra, a chemist and consultant who works with the Louisiana Environmental Action Network.

Another major concern is that the subsea oil and dispersants can be carried by currents in an entirely different direction that where the wind and waves send the surface slick, creating a "much larger area of impact," Subra said.

BP has managed to stem the flow of oil by about 1,000 barrels a day using a mile-long tube inserted into the mouth of the ruptured pipe which is funneling the crude up to a waiting ship.

BP estimates that about 5,000 barrels of oil a day are currently gushing out of the pipe, but independent experts have said that the amount could be as much as ten times higher.

"Even when the leak is stopped completely, there's still going to be that large sheen, there's still going to be that large (level of) dispersant in the water column and in the sediment," Subra told AFP.

"The environmental impact will go on from those sources for a very, very long time and the results of those impacts will last for generations."

Researchers with the National Institute for Undersea Science and Technology discovered evidence of huge undersea plumes of oil - one reportedly 15 to 20 miles long and four or five miles wide - which were already beginning to deplete the oxygen in nearby water by as much as 30 percent.

Jane Lubchenco, who heads the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, cautioned that it was "premature" to conclude that the plumes were caused by the use of chemical dispersants.

"As we have emphasized, dispersants are not a silver bullet," she said in a statement.

"They are used to move us towards the lesser of two environmental outcomes. Until the flow of oil is stemmed, we must take every responsible action to reduce the impact of the oil."

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Winds, currents keep massive oil slick from shore
New Orleans, Louisiana (AFP) May 17, 2010
Favorable winds and currents have kept most of the massive Gulf oil slick from reaching the fragile wetlands and sandy beaches of the US Coast for more than three weeks, experts said. But landfall is inevitable given the sheer volume of crude gushing out of the wreckage of a BP-leased rig, as is damage to marine life and the subsea ecosystem. "It's going to be bad," said biologist Dennis ... read more

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